326 SMALL INDUSTRIES AND 



ter, it will probably more interest the general 

 reader to know something about the con- 

 clusions which can be drawn from the works 

 of the German investigators,* and to know 

 the conclusions that may be drawn from the 

 three censuses of industries which have been 

 made in Germany in the years 1882, 1895, and 

 1907. This is what I am going to do. 



Unhappily, the discussion upon this important 

 subject has often taken in Germany a passionate 

 and even a personally aggressive character. f 

 On the one hand the ultra-conservative ele- 

 ments 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 re- 

 introduction of the old-fashioned, closed and 

 patriarchal corporations which could be placed 

 under the close supervision and tutorship of 

 the State, and they saw hi such a law a weapon 



* The remarks of Prof. Issaieff a thorough investigator of 

 petty trades in Russia, Germany and France (see Works of 

 the Commission for the Study of Petty Trades in Russia (Russian), 

 St. Petersburg, 1879-1887, vol. i.) were for me a valuable guide 

 when I prepared the first edition of this book. Since that time 

 the two industrial censuses of 1895 and 1907 have yielded such 

 a valuable material, that there are quite a number of German 

 works which came to the same conclusions. I shall mention 

 them further on. 



t See K. Buecher's Preface to the Untertuchungen fiber die. 

 Lage des Handwerks in Deutschland, voL iv. 



