SMALL INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 17! 



intellectual life in the villages, or for assuring the 

 peasants' or the country's rights upon- the land, will 

 necessarily further the growth of industries in the vil- 

 lages.* 



Petty Trades in other Countries. 



If it were worth extending our inquiry to other 

 countries, we should find a vast field for most inter- 

 esting observations in Switzerland There we should 

 see the same vitality in a variety of petty industries, 

 and we could mention what has been done in the 

 different cantons for maintaining the small trades by 

 three different sets of measures : the extension of co- 

 operation ; a wide extension of technical education in 

 the schools and the introduction of new branches of 

 semi-artistic production in different parts of the country ; 

 and the supply of cheap motive power in the houses 

 by means of a hydraulic or an electric transmission of 

 power borrowed from the waterfalls. A separate book 

 of the greatest interest and value could be written on this 

 subject, especially on the impulse given to a number of 

 petty trades, old and new, by means of a cheap supply 

 of motive power. 



Belgium would offer an equal interest. Belgium 

 is certainly a country of centralised industry, and a 

 country in which the productivity of the worker stands 

 at a high level, the average annual productivity of each 

 industrial workman men, women, and children attain- 

 ing the high figure of 226 (5660 francs) per head. 

 Coal mines, in which more than a thousand workers are 

 employed, are numerous, and there is a fair number of 

 textile factories in each of which from 300 to 700 workers 

 are occupied. And yet, if we exclude from the indus- 

 trial workers' population of Belgium, which numbered 



* See Appendix Q. 



