SMALL INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 165 



trade, in instrument making, watch making, bicycle 

 making and so on ; and finally, wherever the artistic 

 feeling of the individual worker makes the best part of 

 his goods, as is the case in hundreds of branches of 

 small articles of luxury, there is a wide field for petty 

 trades, rural workshops, domestic industries, and the 

 like. More fresh air, more ideas, more general con- 

 ceptions are evidently required in those industries. But 

 where the spirit of initiative has been awakened in one 

 way or another, we see the petty industries taking a 

 new development in Germany, as we have just seen that 

 being done in France. 



Now, in nearly all the petty trades in Germany, the 

 position of the workers is unanimously described as 

 most miserable, and the many admirers of centralisation 

 which we find in Germany always insist upon this misery 

 in order to predict, and to call for, the disappearance of 

 " those mediaeval survivals " which " capitalist centrali- 

 sation " must supplant for the benefit of the worker. 

 The reality is, however, that when we compare the miser- 

 able conditions of the workers in the petty trades with 

 the conditions of the wage workers in the factories, in 

 the same regions and in the same trades, we see that the 

 very same misery prevails among the factory workers. 

 They live upon wages of from nine to eleven shillings a 

 week, in town slums instead of the country. They work 

 eleven hours a day, and they also are subject to the 

 extra misery thrown upon them during the frequently 

 recurring crises. It is only after they have undergone 

 all sorts of sufferings in their struggles against their 

 employers that some factory workers succeed, more or 

 less, here and there, to wrest from their employers a 

 " living wage " and this again only in certain trades. 



To welcome all these sufferings, seeing in them the 

 action of a " natural law " and a necessary step towards 

 the necessary concentration of industry, would be simply 

 absurd While to maintain that the pauperisation of all 



