248 SMALL INDUSTRIES AND 



boy only, or several weavers, and after having 

 received the yarn from a big employer, pays a 

 skilled workman to put the yarn in the loom, 

 invents what is necessary for weaving a given, 

 sometimes very complicated pattern, and after 

 having woven the cloth or the ribbons in his 

 own loom or in a loom which he hires himself, he 

 is paid for the piece of cloth according to a very 

 complicated scale of wages agreed to between 

 masters and workers. This last form, we shall 

 see presently, is widely spread up to the present 

 day, especially in the woollen and silk trades ; 

 it continues to exist by the side of big factories 

 in which 50, 100, or 5,000 wage- workers, as the 

 case may be, are working with the employers' 

 machinery and are paid in time-wages so much 

 the day or the week. 



The smaU industries are thus quite a world,* 

 which, remarkable enough, continues to exist 

 even in the most industrial countries, side by 

 side with the big factories. Into this world we 

 must now penetrate to cast a glimpse upon it : 

 a glimpse only, because it would take volumes 

 to describe its infinite variety of pursuits and 



* This is why the German economists find such difficulties 

 in delimiting the proper domain of the domestic trades 

 (Hausindustrie), and now identify this word with V erlagssystcm, 

 which means " working either directly or through the inter- 

 mediary of a middleman employer (or buyer) for a dealer or 

 employer, who pays the small producer for the goods he has 

 produced, before they have reached the consumer." 



