330 SMALL INDUSTRIES AND 



hundreds of branches of small articles of luxury, 

 there is a wide field for petty trades, rural 

 workshops, domestic industries, and the like. 

 More fresh air, more ideas, more general con- 

 ceptions, and more co-operation are evidently 

 required in those industries. But where the 

 spirit of initiative has been awakened in one 

 way or another, we see the petty industries 

 taking a new development in Germany, as we 

 have just seen that being done in France. 



Now, in nearly all the petty trades hi Ger- 

 many, the position of the workers is unani- 

 mously described as most miserable, and the 

 many admirers of centralisation which we find 

 in Germany always insist upon this misery 

 in order to predict, and to call for, the dis- 

 appearance of " those mediaeval survivals " 

 which " capitalist centralisation " must supplant 

 for the benefit of the worker. The reality is, 

 however, that when we compare the miserable 

 conditions of the workers in the petty trades 

 with the conditions of the wage workers in 

 the factories, in the same regions and in the 

 same trades, we see that the very same misery 

 prevails among the factory workers. They 

 live upon wages of from nine to eleven shillings 

 a week, in town slums instead of the country. 

 They work eleven hours a day, and they also 

 are subject to the extra misery thrown upon 



