Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/806

784 masterpiece, made under rules that either hampered or destroyed all skill and originality, were rigorously applied. To draw the cords of monopoly still more tightly, rites and ceremonies were invented, the aid and protection of saints invoked, and emblems, banners, badges, and distinctive costumes to mark off each art and trade designed and adopted.

The moral havoc wrought by these monopolies was greater even than the industrial havoc. It crushed all feelings of justice and humanity, making its victims more grasping and cruel than Shylock; it led them to the practice of every trick and deception of a Newgate sharper to evade the laws; it stirred up a contention that rivaled the quarrels of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Apprentices became no better than serfs and slaves. They were not merely pitilessly fined and brutally punished; they were often left in ignorance of the craft that they had purchased the right to learn. In that frightful social and moral revulsion following the long and devastating wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the corporations became more determined than ever to maintain their industrial aristocracy and monopoly. They refused to admit any trade less ancient and honorable than their own, to the rights and privileges of the law; they soiled themselves by contact with no person of illegitimate birth; and in their savage and relentless pursuit of persons engaged in unauthorized traffic they invaded the homes of contraband workmen, confiscating both their tools and the hidden products of their toil, leaving them and their families destitute and starving. To such absurd lengths was the creation of corporations carried for the production of new taxes and new places for court favorites that occupations like the teaching of dancing, the selling of flowers, and the catching of birds were organized, and homogeneous occupations like the hatmakers' and carpenters' were divided and subdivided beyond the comprehension of the modern mind. But despite the ingenuity of lawyers and the vigilance of armies of inspectors, the lines of demarcation could not be drawn so sharply as to avoid conflicts of interests. The makers of felt hats quarreled with the makers of cotton hats. The spinners who had purchased the right to use hemp quarreled with those that had purchased the right to use flax. The shoemakers fought with the cobblers that reproduced more than two thirds of an old shoe. The cutlers that made the handles of knives fought with those that made the blades. The relations of the makers of wooden porringers and the makers of wooden spoons were equally belligerent. Blanqui says that in the middle of the seventeenth century the annual cost of litigation over these inevitable