Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/37

 (venal for the greater part) to classify, read, judge all these documents, to pass judgment on every detail; to regulate the way to forgo a horse's hoof, bleach linen, salt herrings, make a barrel, and so on ad infinitum … and the tide still rose!

But this was not all. Soon the State laid hands on exportation. It saw in this commerce a means of enrichment,—and seized upon it. Formerly, when a dispute arose between two towns about the value of exported cloth, the purity of wool, or the capacity of barrels of herrings, the two towns made remonstrances to each other. If the dispute lasted long, they addressed themselves to a third town to step in as arbitrator (this happened constantly); or else a congress of guilds of weavers and coopers was convened to regulate internationally the quality and value of cloth or the capacity of barrels.

Now, however, the State had stepped in and taken upon itself to regulate all these contentions from the centre, in Paris or in London. Through its functionaries it regulated the capacity of barrels, specified the quality of cloth, ordered the number of threads and their thickness in the warp and the woof and interfered in, the smallest details of each industry.

You know the result. Industry under this control was dying out in the eighteenth century.

What had in fact become of Benvenuto Cellini's art under State tutelage?—Vanished.—And the architecture of those guilds of masons and carpenters whose works of art we still admire?—Only look at the hideous monuments of the State period, and at one glance you will know that architecture was dead, so dead that up till now it has not been able to recover from the blow dealt it by the State.

What became of the fabrics of Bruges, of the cloth from Holland? What became of those blacksmiths, so skilled in manipulating iron, and who, in each European borough, know how to turn this ungrateful metal into the most exquisite decorations? What became of those turners, those clock-makers, those fitters, who had made Nuremberg one of the glories of the Middle Ages by their instruments of precision? Speak of them to James Watt who for his steam engine, looked in vain during thirty years for a man who could make a fairly round cylinder, and whose machine remained thirty years a rough model for want of workmen to construct it!

Such was the result of State interference in the domain of industry. All that the State managed to do was to tighten the screw on the worker, depopulate the land, sow misery in the towns, reduce thousands of beings to the state of starvelings and impose industrial slavery.

And it is these miserable wrecks of ancient guilds, those organisms,