328 SMALL INDUSTRIES AND 



Under such conditions, the polemics about 

 the petty trades and the domestic industries are 

 evidently doomed to remain most unproductive. 

 However, it is pleasant to see that a consider- 

 able amount of most conscientious work has 

 been made for the investigation of the petty 

 trades in Germany ; and, by the side of such 

 monographs, from which nothing can be 

 learned but that the petty trades' workers 

 are in a miserable condition, and nothing 

 whatever can be gathered to explain why these 

 workers prefer then* conditions to those of 

 factory hands there is no lack of very de- 

 tailed monographs (such as those of Thun, 

 Em. H. Sax, Paul Voigt on the Berlin cabinet- 

 makers, etc.), in which one sees the whole of 

 the life of these classes of workers, the diffi- 

 culties which they have to cope with, and the 

 technical conditions of the trade, and finds all 

 the elements for an independent judgment 

 upon the matter. 



It is evident that a number of petty trades are 



the growing variety of demand, nor the cheap means which are 

 now in use for the supply of motive power in small quantities. 

 Being a thinker, he would have studied these facts, and very 

 probably he would have mitigated the absoluteness of his 

 earlier formulas, as in fact he did once with regard to the village 

 community in Russia. It would be most desirable that his 

 followers should rely less upon abstract formulae easy as they 

 may be as watchwords in political struggles and try to imitate 

 their teacher in his analysis of concrete economical phenomena. 



