242 SMALL INDUSTRIES AND 



development of machinery, and they broke the 

 link which formerly connected the farm with the 

 workshop. Factories grew up and they aban- 

 doned the fields. They gathered where the sale 

 of their produce was easiest, or the raw materials 

 and fuel could be obtained with the greatest 

 advantage. New cities rose, and the old ones 

 rapidly enlarged ; the fields were deserted. 

 Millions of labourers, driven away by sheer force 

 from the land, gathered in the cities in search of 

 labour, and soon forgot the bonds which formerly 

 attached them to the soil. And we, in our ad- 

 miration of the prodigies achieved under the 

 new factory system, overlooked the advantages 

 of the old system under which the tiller of the 

 soil was an industrial worker at the same time. 

 We doomed to disappearance all those branches 

 of industry which formerly used to prosper in 

 the villages ; we condemned in industry all that 

 was not a big factory. 



True, the results were grand as regards the 

 increase of the productive powers of man. But 

 they proved terrible as regards the millions of 

 human beings who were plunged into misery 

 and had to rely upon precarious means of living 

 in our cities. Moreover, the system, as a whole, 

 brought about those abnormal conditions which 

 I have endeavoured to sketch in the two first 

 chapters. We were thus driven into a corner ; 



