SMALL INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 163 



the ultra-conservative elements of German politics tried, 

 and succeeded to some extent, in making of the petty 

 trades and the domestic industries an arm for securing 

 a return to the " olden good times ". They even passed 

 a law intended to prepare a reintroduction of the old- 

 fashioned, closed and patriarchal corporations which 

 could be placed under the close supervision and tutorship 

 of the State, and they saw in such a law a weapon 

 against social democracy. On the other hand, the social 

 democrats, justly opposed to such measures, but them- 

 selves inclined, in their turn, to take too abstract a 

 view of economical questions, bitterly attack all those 

 who do not merely repeat the stereotyped phrases to the 

 effect that " the petty trades are in decay," and " the 

 sooner they disappear the better," as they will give room 

 to capitalist centralisation, which, according to the social 

 democratic creed, " will soon achieve its own ruin ".* 

 In this dislike of the small industries they are, of course, 

 at one with the economists of the orthodox school, whom 

 'they combat on nearly all other points. 



Under such conditions, the polemics about the petty 



* The foundation for this creed is contained in one of the concluding 

 chapters of Marx's Kapital (the last but one), in which the author spoke 

 of the concentration of capital and saw in it the " fatality of a natural 

 law". In the "forties," this idea was shared by nearly all socialists, 

 and continually recurred in their writings. But Marx was too much of 

 a thinker that he should not have taken notice of the subsequent 

 developments of industrial life, which were not foreseen in 1848 ; if he 

 had lived now he surely would not have shut his eyes to the formidable 

 growth of the numbers of small capitalists and to the middle-class 

 fortunes which are made in a thousand ways under the shadow of the 

 modern " millionaires ". Very likely he would have noticed also the 

 extreme slowness with which the wrecking of small industries goes on 

 a slowness which could not be predicted fifty or forty years ago, 

 because no one could foresee at that time the facilities which have been 

 offered since for transport, the growing variety of demand, nor the cheap 

 means which are now in use for the supply of motive power in small 

 quantities. Being a thinker, he would have studied these facts, and very 

 probably he would have mitigated the absoluteness of his earlier formulae, 

 as in fact he did once with regard to the village community in Russia. 

 It would be most desirable that his followers should rely less upon 

 abstract formulae easy as they may be as watchwords in political 

 struggles and try to imitate their teacher in his analysis of concrete 

 economical phenomena. 



