134 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



attention bestowed upon it in Germany, and especially 

 in Russia. And yet we can guess that even in this 

 country of great industries, the numbers of those who 

 earn their livelihood in the petty trades most probably 

 equal, if they do not surpass, the numbers of those 

 employed in the factories.* We know, at any rate, that 

 the suburbs of London, Glasgow, and other great cities 

 swarm with small workshops, and there are regions where 

 the petty trades are as developed as they are in Switzer- 

 land or in Germany. Sheffield is a well-known example 

 in point The Sheffield cutlery one of the glories of 

 England is not made by machinery : it is chiefly made 

 by hand There are at Sheffield a few firms which 

 manufacture cutlery right through from the making of 

 steel to the finishing of tools, and employ wage-workers ; 

 and yet even these firms I am told by Edward Car- 

 penter, who kindly collected for me information about 

 the Sheffield trade let out some part of their work to 

 the "small masters". But by far the greatest number 

 of the cutlers work in their homes with their relatives, 

 or in small workshops supplied with wheel-power, which 

 they rent for a few shillings a week. Immense yards 

 are covered with buildings, which are subdivided into 

 numbers of small workshops. Some of these cover but 

 a few square yards, and there I saw smiths hammering, 

 all the day long, blades of knives on a small anvil, close 

 by the blaze of their fires ; occasionally the smith may 

 have one helper, or two. In the upper storeys scores of 

 small workshops are supplied with wheel-power, and 

 in each of them, three, four, or five workers and a 

 " master " fabricate, with the occasional aid of a few 

 plain machines, every description of tools: files, saws, 



* We find it stated in various economic works that there arc nearly 

 1,000,000 workers employed in the big factories of England alone, and 

 1,047,000 employed in the petty trades the various trades connected 

 with food (bakers, butchers, and so on) and the building trades being 

 included in the last figure. But I do not know how far these figures are 

 reliable. 



