SMALL INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 135 



blades of knives, razors, and so on. Grinding and glaz- 

 ing are done in other small workshops, and even steel 

 is cast in a small foundry, the working staff of which 

 consists only of five or six men. When walking through 

 these workshops I easily imagined myself in a Russian 

 cutlery village, like Pavlovo or Vorsma. The Sheffield 

 cutlery has thus maintained its olden organisation, and 

 the fact is the more remarkable as the earnings of the 

 cutlers are low as a rule ; but, even when reduced to a 

 few shillings a week, the cutler prefers to vegetate on his 

 small earnings than to enter as a waged labourer in a 

 " house ". The spirit of the old trade organisations, 

 which were so much spoken of five-and-twenty years 

 ago, is thus still alive. 



Until lately, Leeds and its environs were also the 

 seat of extensive domestic industries. When Edward 

 Baines wrote, in 1857, his first account of the Yorkshire 

 industries (in Th. Baines's Yorkshire, Past and Present\ 

 most of the woollen cloth which was made in that region 

 was woven by hand.* Twice a week the hand-made 

 cloth was brought to the Clothiers' Hall, and by noon 

 it was sold to the merchants, who had it dressed in their 

 factories. Joint-stock mills were run by combined 

 clothiers in order to prepare and spin the wool, but it 

 was woven in the hand-looms by the clothiers and the 

 members of their families. Twelve years later the hand- 

 loom was superseded to a great extent by the power- 

 loom; but the clothiers, who were anxious to maintain 

 their independence, resorted to a peculiar organisation : 

 they rented a room, or part of a room, and sometimes also 

 the power-looms in a workshop, and they worked inde- 

 pendently a characteristic organisation partly main- 

 tained until now, and well adapted to illustrate the 



* Nearly one-half of the 43,000 operatives who were employed at 

 that time in the woollen trade of this country were weaving in hand- 

 looms. So also one-fifth of the 79,000 persons employed in the worsted 

 trade. 



