Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/437

Rh not an adequate one, was secured by the handing down of the traditions of craft from father to son. This method was suited to the household system of industry. At a later time the supply was made sure by a careful supervision of apprenticeship, and this proved successful so long as the shop system endured. The dominant industrial organization previous to the introduction of the factory system was the guild—an institution which, in addition to other duties discharged, made itself responsible for the regulation of apprenticeship and for the preservation of standards of workmanship. These standards it was able to fix since it included both masters and workmen, and it maintained them by means of the masterpiece, the trade-mark and the power of excluding incompetent workmen from the trade and inferior articles from the market. The present industrial system has broken down all these regulations. The traditions of craft do not preserve validity long enough in this age of rapid mechanical evolution to be handed down with profit from father to son. The freedom of choice of occupation and the constant ebb and flow of population between producing regions now prevent the accumulation of any great store of traditional skill and knowledge among the workmen of any one locality. The factory system has rendered apprenticeship impracticable, not only because there is? no time for the employee to teach and the novitiate to learn, but because the subdivision of labor is so great that a systematic progression of tasks must needs be arranged to give the beginner even a comprehensive knowledge of a rule-of-thumb character concerning a trade; and this the modern competitive institution is usually not in a position to grant. Furthermore, the guild has disappeared and in its place have come the trades unions, composed exclusively of employees, and having as their primary object warfare through the strike to secure higher wages and shorter hours of labor. The trades unions have not undertaken to set standards of excellence in workmanship or material as did the guild, nor can they do so, for they do not control the processes of industry as did the guild. The attention paid by them to apprenticeship is not for the purpose of educating the artisan but to restrict the number of persons in a trade and so affect wages.

The old system has crumbled to pieces, and yet never was there greater need of an intelligent artisan class than at present. Never have the machine and the routine of production so threatened to dwarf the worker; never has there been more wealth under the control of those of artistic aspirations ready to pay for the best creative work of the artisan. Never has there been greater need of joy and pride in work and healthful mental stimulus in it to offset the deadening effects of a narrow spirit of commercialism; never has society more needed a sound middle class capable of right thinking and sufficient initiative to hold together the extremes of wealth and poverty that our wonderful economic system now produces.