782 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Boehmert, " engaged in the same profession formed associations 

 for the protection of their person, their families, and their prop- 

 erty ; for the creation of an internal moral and economic police, 

 and particularly to punish associates who, by cheating in the 

 quality of their products, could injure the reputation of the 

 whole city ; to watch over the completion of a regular apprentice- 

 ship, and to exercise a moral censorship over apprentices and 

 journeymen ; to take care of the widows, the orphans, the aged, 

 and the infirm among them ; to join together in the parish and 

 to have masses said over the dead ; to furnish a contingent of 

 arquebusiers to the troops of the city, and, in general, to satisfy 

 all social wants." * 



Even when Etienne Boyleau, the famous provost of Paris 

 under St. Louis and the author of the still more famous Livre des 

 Metiers, gave these corporations a legal status, there was still an 

 excuse. He was a warrior, with a warrior's love of discipline and 

 system ; he was a magistrate, with a magistrate's hatred of all 

 kinds of lawlessness and dishonesty ; he was a tax reformer, with 

 tax reformer's eye to new sources of revenue for the impoverished 

 treasury of a crusading monarch. " He re-established discipline 

 in commerce, and in the arts and trades," says a writer in the 

 Biographie Universelle, " in the collection of the royal taxes with- 

 in his jurisdiction, and fixed those of the seigniorial courts in- 

 cluded in his provostship; he moderated and fixed the imposts 

 that were raised arbitrarily, under the provost farmers, on com- 

 merce and merchandise ; he arranged all the traders and all the 

 artisans in difi^erent bodies and communities under the title of 

 brotherhoods ; it was he that gave these corporations their first 

 status for disciplinary purposes, and established the rules for the 

 encouragement of honesty and commerce." \ But there is reason 

 to believe that the chief purposes of this feudal reformer were 

 police and fiscal. " The kings," says Depping, " made successful 

 use of the corporations for the collections of imposts, then very 

 imperfectly done. When the artisans and traders were formed 

 into a body, it sufficed to summon the head men and to charge 

 them with the collection of the taille for each trade. ... It be- 

 came easier to designate the persons that should keep watch 

 during the night, a forced labor that displeased the Parisians 

 very much, and from which they sought as much as possible to 

 escape." J 



It is an inevitable tendency of all organizations, whatever be 

 their purpose, be it political or industrial, to consolidate and 



* Dictionnaire general de la Politique. Par M. Maurice Block. See Corporations, by 

 V. Boehmert, vol. i, p. 537. f Vol. v, p. 436. 



X Rfeglemens sur les Arts et Metiers de Paris. Avec Notes et une Introduction. Par 

 G.-B. Depping, p. Ixxxiv. See also Palgrave, Dictionary of Political Economy, pp. 430, 431. 



