The Armies of Labor | Page 4

as he considered his relation to his superiors or to his
inferiors. Whatever movement there was took place horizontally, in the
same class or on the same social level. The movement was not vertical,
as it so frequently is today, and men did not ordinarily rise above the
social level of their birth, never by design, and only perhaps by rare
accident or genius. It was a little world of lords and serfs; of knights
who graced court and castle, jousted at tournaments, or fought upon the
field of battle; and of serfs who toiled in the fields, served in the castle,
or, as the retainers of the knight, formed the crude soldiery of medieval
days. For their labor and allegiance they were clothed and housed and
fed. Yet though there were feast days gay with the color of pageantry
and procession, the worker was always in a servile state, an underman
dependent upon his master, and sometimes looking upon his condition
as little better than slavery.

With the break-up of this rigid system came in England the
emancipation of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the
beginnings of peasant agriculture. That personal gravitation which
always draws together men of similar ambitions and tasks now began
to work significant changes in the economic order. The peasantry, more
or less scattered in the country, found it difficult to unite their powers
for redressing their grievances, although there were some peasant
revolts of no mean proportions. But the artisans of the towns were soon
grouped into powerful organizations, called guilds, so carefully
managed and so well disciplined that they dominated every craft and
controlled every detail in every trade. The relation of master to
journeyman and apprentice, the wages, hours, quantity, and quality of
the output, were all minutely regulated. Merchant guilds, similarly
constituted, also prospered. The magnificent guild halls that remain in
our day are monuments of the power and splendor of these
organizations that made the towns of the later Middle Ages flourishing
centers of trade, of handicrafts, and of art. As towns developed, they
dealt the final blow to an agricultural system based on feudalism; they
became cities of refuge for the runaway serfs, and their charters,
insuring political and economic freedom, gave them superior
advantages for trading.
The guild system of manufacture was gradually replaced by the
domestic system. The workman's cottage, standing in its garden,
housed the loom and the spinning wheel, and the entire family was
engaged in labor at home. But the workman, thus apparently
independent, was not the owner of either the raw material or the
finished product. A middleman or agent brought him the wool, carried
away the cloth, and paid him his hire. Daniel Defoe, who made a tour
of Britain in 1794-6, left a picture of rural England in this period, often
called the golden age of labor. The land, he says, "was divided into
small inclosures from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more;
every three or four pieces of land had an house belonging to
them, ...hardly an house standing out of a speaking distance from
another .... We could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every
tenter a piece of cloth or kersie or shalloon .... At every considerable
house was a manufactory .... Every clothier keeps one horse, at least, to

carry his manufactures to the market and every one generally keeps a
cow or two or more for his family. By this means the small pieces of
inclosed land about each house are occupied, for they scarce sow corn
enough to feed their poultry .... The houses are full of lusty fellows,
some at the dye vat, some at the looms, others dressing the clothes; the
women or children carding or spinning, being all employed, from the
youngest to the oldest."
But more significant than these changes was the rise of the so-called
mercantile system, in which the state took under its care industrial
details that were formerly regulated by the town or guild. This system,
beginning in the sixteenth century and lasting through the eighteenth,
had for its prime object the upbuilding of national trade. The state, in
order to insure the homogeneous development of trade and industry,
dictated the prices of commodities. It prescribed the laws of
apprenticeship and the rules of master and servant. It provided
inspectors for passing on the quality of goods offered for sale. It
weighed the loaves, measured the cloth, and tested the silverware. It
prescribed wages, rural and urban, and bade the local justice act as a
sort of guardian over the laborers in his district. To relieve poverty poor
laws were passed; to prevent the decline of productivity corn laws were
passed fixing arbitrary prices for grain. For a time monopolies