160 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



persons employed in workshops which have less than 

 five operatives is almost twice as big as the number of 

 persons employed in the larger establishments.* In 

 fact, Paris is a great bee-hive where hundreds of thou- 

 sands of men and women fabricate in small workshops 

 all possible varieties of goods which require skill, taste 

 and invention. These small workshops, in which artistic 

 finish and rapidity of work are so much praised, neces- 

 sarily stimulate the mental powers of the producers ; 

 and we may safely admit that if the Paris workmen are 

 generally considered, and really are, more developed 

 intellectually than the workers of any other European 

 capital, this is due to a great extent to the character 

 of the work they are engaged in a work which implies 

 artistic taste, skill, and especially inventiveness, always 

 wide awake in order to invent new patterns of goods 

 and steadily to increase and to perfect the technical 

 methods of production. It also appears very probable 

 that if we find a highly developed working population 

 in Vienna and Warsaw, this depends again to a very great 

 extent upon the very considerable development of similar 

 small industries, which stimulate invention and so much 

 contribute to develop the worker's intelligence. 



The Galerie du travail at the Paris exhibitions is 

 always a most remarkable sight. One can appreciate 

 in it both the variety of the small industries which are 

 carried on in French towns and the skill and inventing 

 powers of the workers. And the question necessarily 

 arises : Must all this skill, all this intelligence, be swept 

 away by the factory, instead of becoming a new fertile 

 source of progress under a better organisation of pro- 

 duction ? must all this independence and inventiveness 

 of the worker disappear before the factory levelling? 



*In 1873, out of a total population of 1,851,800 inhabiting Paris, 

 816,040 (404,408 men and 411,632 women) were living on industry, and 

 out of them only 293,691 were connected with the factories (grande 

 Industrie), while 522,349 were living on the petty trades (petite Industrie). 

 Maxime du Camp. P<**i* e* ses Organe* vol. vi. 



