1. Their suppression in European Countries.—(a) The eighteenth century, the first half of which was an age of analysis, criticism, and social satire, was in its second half a time of innovation and invention, bold in its theory and practice, eager to correct and reform social organization in accordance with an ideal of justice born of reason. It was therefore both destructive and constructive.

In its first years it saw the beginning of a new economic phase. A revolution, as serious as that caused by the discovery of America and the sea-route to the Indies, began to operate in the world. As usual, it was commerce which, by its vast extension, broke the bounds within which society had been circumscribed. It was conscious of its importance and dignity. Voltaire sang the praises of the merchant “who enriched the country, and from his office gives orders to Surata and Cairo, and contributes to the happiness of the world.” Sedaine, in the Philosophe sans le Savoir, calls the merchant “the man of universe,” and compares the traders to so many “threads of silk which bind together the nations and lead them back to peace by the needs of commerce.” In 1760 Turgot proposed to ennoble the great traders, and great lords were not above going into business. The Duke of La Force was a wholesale grocer. On the sea there was the continual coming and going of vessels which ploughed the oceans, ransacked the archipelagoes, and opened up yet another continent, Australia, to European conquest: on land, improved means of communication and transport trebled the passenger and goods traffic. England at that time had her “canal fever”: in France the wonderful network of roads was the admiration of all strangers.

In all civilized nations the enterprise of Banks, Bourses, great Companies and Chambers of Commerce resulted in such a circulation of money and boldness of enterprise as had never been seen. All this necessitated an intensity of production hitherto unknown, and the invention of new methods. It was now necessary to create and supply the demands of consumers who were no longer confined to the limits of a State, however large it might be, but scattered over the face of the globe; who no longer numbered a few hundred thousands, but amounted to dozens or hundreds of millions. In short, markets began to expand to the very ends of the earth, and the period of international economics set in.

In this commercial expansion, European capitalism played the chief part, and, in Europe, England held the chief place. Mistress of the sea and of a colonial empire of which India and North America were the most valuable possessions, she became enormously rich; France and Holland followed, but some distance behind. We already know the natural tendencies of “great” commerce: it dislikes all barriers and hindrances to its activity. It always had been and was once more inimical to the system of the closed market so dear to the small craft guilds. Its ideal was free trade. So true is this that in France, in 1654,[138] the Six Guilds strongly protested against the taxes which struck at the importation of goods made outside the kingdom; moreover the liberal movement against the guilds emanated from the merchant aristocracy, and Gournay, its exponent in France, held the title of director of commerce.

“Great” industry developed with unprecedented strength under the same impetus. The aged tree, in which the sap was still rising, suddenly put forth vigorous branches. In England, engineering and coal-mining are prime necessaries to its life, and the cotton industry imported from the Indies attracted many thousands of workers in a few years and kept them permanently employed. This industrial revolution took place both in those vast enterprises in which the ancient hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen, and masters became meaningless—since a handful of masters possessed the capital and appliances, while the mass of workmen possessed nothing:—and in those new enterprises which, like the manufacture of cotton fabrics, owed to their recent origin the fact that they had never been under the old guild system. The guilds themselves could not but suffer from the extraordinary growth which took place beside but outside their system.

Three forces in especial worked against them—three forces which led to invention, to the transformation of technique, and so to the overthrow of traditional rules: these were, the desire to save labour—a desire which dominates all human activity,—science, and fashion.

(b) At first, masters and workmen were agreed on one point—the reduction of effort which was imposed on them, and which meant reduction of expenses for the former, and reduction of labour for the latter. Workmen and workwomen had suffered from the imperfection of the tools they had used, and from the craft which they carried on; for generations they had contracted diseases and infirmities which were a trade-mark; the silk workers of Lyons for instance were recognized by their bent knees. Having seen their parents and grandparents die in hospital, tired and worn out before their time, they eagerly sought for means whereby they could save themselves, their children, and their comrades, from dangerous and exhausting work. They thought out and tried ingenious methods for lightening their tasks. The first inventors of improvements were thus workers, familiar with the machines which were their daily companions. From the time when the cotton industry became mechanical in England we can follow the rivalry—the struggle for speed which for half a century went on between spinning and weaving, each in turn getting ahead of and then being passed by the other;[139] it was a duel between inventors who were simple workmen and happened to be mechanics. In France, Vaucanson and Jacquard did the same thing for silk in Lyons, where labour was less regulated than elsewhere. They were encouraged and led by their masters and sometimes by the State; but they were unfortunate in unexpectedly encountering the hostility of the silk workers whom they thought to help. This was because (and there is nothing which more clearly demonstrates the faults in the organization of labour) the introduction of all new machinery, while it operates in favour of the master by advancing the speed of production, throws on the streets a certain number of workmen who are no longer wanted, and who, while waiting for increased production to give them back their means of livelihood, fall a prey to famine and misery. Montesquieu wrote on this subject:[140]

“If an article is of a fairly low price, and one which equally suits him who buys it and the workman who has made it, machines which would simplify its manufacture, that is to say diminish the number of workmen, would be injurious; and if water-mills were not everywhere established, I should not believe them to be as useful as people say, because they throw innumerable hands out of work....”

This explains the curious spectacle offered by the world of labour in the eighteenth century; the masters in “great” industry, like the wholesale traders, were the revolutionaries; their workmen, like the guilds, were the reactionaries.

(c) Science, however, was not long in coming to the rescue of the inventors who had risen from the working class. The scientists, whose function it is to increase human knowledge and the power of men over nature, gave proof in their turn of creative imagination; they captured and tamed hitherto unused or rebel forces: steam, subdued and enslaved, became the magician which began by giving movement to bands, wheels, hands of steel and iron, carriages and boats, and ended by carrying on every sort of craft. It could spin, weave, screw, rivet, plane, full, lift up, saw, cut off, glean, thresh corn, etc. Chemistry and physics were by no means inferior to mechanical science; they composed and decomposed bodies, transformed and melted them one into another, created new ones by bold combinations, produced heat, light, and energy. What weight had the old regulations in view of this transformation of methods and appliances? Who could uphold them? The guilds in defending them were like men with spades who should try to stop a train going at full speed.

(d) Fashion acts in the same manner, for the word is synonymous with change. It is a power in every country, but particularly where there is smart, worldly society. The guilds learnt this to their cost in a matter which was the talk of the court for years. In France an edict, inspired by them, had prohibited the use of printed cottons which came from India. They might be seized anywhere, even on people who were wearing them. But it was an absurd notion to try to check by force the changes of taste, when women, who love novelty in dress as much as they often do in matters of belief and custom, took it into their heads to wear a material which pleased them! The Marquise of Nesles appeared openly in the gardens of the Tuileries, dressed in Indian cotton. They dared not arrest her! Other Court ladies did as she had done, and, after a long struggle, printed cottons won the day; they were installed at the very gates of Paris, and made the fortune of Oberkampf their manufacturer, and were well known under the name of “toiles de Jouy”!

(e) While the defences behind which the guilds had taken refuge were thus battered down, a crusade against them was begun by public opinion. Economists and philosophers united in attacking their principles in the name of liberty and equality, two ideas which roused much enthusiasm in the world at that time. The guilds were denounced as opposed to the general interest of producers in that they stood for privilege and exclusiveness and prevented numbers of people, who could neither enter them nor set up beside them, from earning an honest livelihood. They were condemned as being contrary to the general interests of consumers; for, burdened with enormous debts, wasting their money in festivals, feasts, and legal expenses, condemned to laborious methods of manufacture through their inability to improve them, they were yet able by means of their monopolies to keep up prices and to make unduly large profits, without even being capable of satisfying their clients if they expressed the smallest desire to have something out of the ordinary.

The physiocrats had another grievance against the guilds: they were opposed to them because they diverted capital from the cultivation of the land, in which, according to them, it would have been used to much greater advantage. By degrees, among the two peoples which led the European thought of the time—Great Britain and France,—these accusations were condensed into a formula which was the death-warrant of the guilds: Laissez-faire! Laissez-passer! At Edinburgh in 1776 Adam Smith’s famous work appeared, and was looked on as the Gospel of the new doctrine. In 1775 there appeared in Paris a posthumous work by President Bigot of Sainte-Croix, entitled An Essay on the Freedom of Commerce and Industry.

2. It was in England, the country in which regulation was then weakest and where it had not touched great cities like Manchester and Birmingham,[141] where “great” commerce and “great” industry made the strongest and most rapid advances, that these theories most quickly triumphed, born as they were of surrounding realities. But, in accordance with the English custom, there was no violent rupture with the past, no solemn repudiation of theories hitherto followed, no complete and sudden abolition of the guild system. The change in economic organization came by a series of small local and partial measures. The Statute of Labourers had in 1563 unified and codified the rules of the Middle Ages; these were not wholly repealed, but, in 1728,[142] the master hat-makers, dyers, and cotton printers demanded of Parliament (and obtained their demand fifty years later) that they should be exempt from obeying the rules as to the number of apprentices, who might be replaced by men hands. In 1753 the statutes of the stocking-makers were abolished as “injurious and vexatious to the manufacturers” and “hurtful to the trade,” as “against all reason and opposed to the liberty of English subjects.” In vain the workers sometimes united with the small masters, and sought behind these crumbling shelters protection against the ills inflicted on them by the development of “great” industry and of machinery; in vain they hoped for the application of the law which entrusted to the justices of the peace the duty of fixing their wages; in vain they made enormous sacrifices to get their rights established in legal documents.[143] From the year 1756 the weavers of napery were abandoned to their fate by the House of Commons. After a period of hesitation and self-contradiction, “governmental nihilism” became under similar circumstances the policy of Parliament. But it was still more than half a century before the statute of 1563, which had survived from a former age, disappeared under the blows struck at it by the “great” tradesmen; it was suspended, then abolished for the wool industry in 1809, and finally done away with in 1814. Almost at the same date, in 1813, the right of fixing the wages of labour was taken away from justices of the peace. Of the economic legislation of the Middle Ages, there still remained the laws which prohibited workers from forming any sort of combination, and decided that in every dispute the word of a master should be accepted before that of a servant; but of the guilds nothing was left but atrophied and lifeless bodies, which were little more than memories, or names often given to what were far from being professional associations.

In France, where there is a love of unity, logic, and harmony, things developed differently. Guild monopolies continued, it is true, by means of bribery; but their domain was narrowed by the creation of the SÈvres factory and the Royal Printing Press, and by the working of many mines at the expense of the State. In 1762 all industrial privileges were limited to fifteen years, a serious menace directed against privileges which had been held to be perpetual. In the same year the freedom of rural industry was proclaimed; in 1763 that of the leather trade, and in 1765 that of wholesale trade for commons as well as nobles. The corn trade, in spite of the fear of monopoly, profited by a similar liberty for a short time (1763). Simultaneously, the guilds were stripped, and their doors thrown open. In 1755 it was decided that foreign journeymen might be hired in every town in the kingdom except Paris, Lyons, Lille, and Rouen. In 1767 the doors were opened wide to foreigners and Jews—competitors as much hated as feared. In the same year the invasion was completed by a large number of letters of mastership which gave every craft in Paris twelve new masters, and every craft in the provinces from eight to two, while the purchase of these licences by the Six Guilds was not authorized even if a larger sum were offered. Monopoly was therefore extended, not destroyed. But such a solution was merely a compromise, and things developed in the direction of suppression pure and simple.

It was Turgot, as every one knows, who took upon himself to do away with wardenships and masterships. A disciple of both Gournay and Quesnay, he condemned them in the name of industry and agriculture, and in the interests of consumers and producers. The famous edict of March 1776, which he signed as minister of Louis XVI., declared that they were abolished throughout the kingdom with four exceptions: the wig-makers, who held posts sold to them by the State itself; the printer-booksellers, the supervision of whom was kept by the authorities for political reasons; the goldsmiths, because the sale of precious metals was under special legislation; and the apothecaries, as the control of their trade was considered necessary for public health. The property of the guilds was sold and the proceeds, together with the funds in hand, were used for wiping out their debts. The confraternities were done away with at the same time, and their wealth handed over to the bishops. All associations of masters or journeymen were prohibited.

Such an edict, completely revolutionizing the organization of labour, could not pass without obstruction and resistance. The Parlement, as defender of the ancient traditions of France, only registered it under protest and at the express wish of the king; the Six Guilds were defended by the writings of a man whose name will for ever have a sinister sound—Dr. Guillotin. The unrest was intense; the freedom of the corn trade served as a pretext, if not a real cause, for riots known as the “flour war.” Turgot had made a St. Bartholomew of privileges, therefore all the privileged combined against him. The king said to him, “Only you and I love the people, M. Turgot.” Some days after, the king dismissed him, and, on August 28, the edict was repealed. Wardens and masters were reestablished, first in Paris and a little later in the other towns. But so decayed a system as this could not suffer even the most passing effacement with impunity. At first it did not reappear in its entirety and the number of free crafts remained considerably larger. It could only live at all by reforming itself, so the rights and expenses of reception were reduced by half, two-thirds, or sometimes even three-quarters; kindred crafts were fused and the practice of several crafts at once authorized; women were admitted to mastership in men’s communities and vice versa; foreigners, too, could now aspire to mastership. But the original narrowness persisted; a new inequality sprang up between masters and fellows; the rules for maintaining internal discipline and the domestic authority of the employers over the workmen became, not less, but more rigorous; the journeymen were still forbidden to have common funds, to assemble without permission, or to be together more than three at a time; to carry arms, to concern themselves with the hiring of labour, to leave work unfinished, or to present themselves without a letter of discharge from their last master. A strike could always be punished as a desertion of work. A maximum wage was always fixed as well as the time allowed for the mid-day meal. The regulations for manufacture, however, became less strict; under Necker’s ministry, the manufacturer might choose whether he would conform to them or not. If he did, he had the right to have his goods stamped, and stuffs so made were distinguished by a special selvage; other products received the “stamp of freedom.”

The commercial treaty, concluded with England in 1786, severely tried the system already so weakened. The guilds suddenly found themselves exposed at many points to foreign competition, and complained bitterly when the convocation of the States-General gave France the opportunity of expressing her opinion, along with other more important subjects, on the existence of the guilds.

The debate reports of 1789 betray a certain indecision on the matter; the two privileged classes—nobles and clergy—when they were not indifferent to the whole question, leant towards suppression; the Third Estate—for the election of which the small crafts had not received equal treatment with “great” commerce, the liberal professions, and the rich bourgeoisie—were divided almost equally, one half favouring the abolition, the other the reformation, which implied the retention, of the system.

Apparently at first the latter carried the day. On the night of August 4, 1789, the reformation of masterships was one of the numerous motions voted with enthusiasm. But less than two years later, in March 1791, in a bill for the taxation of licences, the mover, Dallard, had the following article (number 8), inserted:

From April 1 next, inclusive, every citizen will be free to carry on whatever profession or trade seems good to him, after having procured and paid for a licence.

This meant the end of masterships and wardenships. An indemnity was to be allowed the masters for the money they had spent, and to the wigmakers and to the barbers for the posts they had bought. With no fuss, almost without discussion, and without finding any one to defend them in the Assembly, the guilds ceased to be after an existence which had lasted for many centuries.

In June of the same year, a new law was destined to stifle any inclination they might have shown to come to life again. The pretext given for condemning them to their fate was the formation of societies of workers with the object of raising wages. Chapelier, affirming that it was the duty of the State to assist the infirm and find work for those who needed it in order to live, protested against every association which claimed to substitute a collective contract for the individual contract between master and workers.[144] Article 2 of the law in question reads:

Citizens of the same condition or profession, middlemen, those who keep open shops, workmen and compagnons of whatever art, may not, when they find themselves together, nominate president, secretary or syndic, keep registers, pass resolutions, make regulations for what they claim to be their common interests, or bind themselves by agreements leading to the concerted refusal or to the granting only at a certain price, of the help of their industry and labours.

According to a phrase taken from a petition addressed by the master-builders to the municipality of Paris, the above resolutions and agreements, if they ever happened to be made, had to be declared “unconstitutional, opposed to liberty and to the declaration of the rights of Man”; the authors, instigators, and signatories of these acts or writings were to pay a fine of £500 each, and to be deprived for a year of their rights of active citizenship. Severer penalties were provided in all cases of threat and unlawful assembly.

Thus pure reaction, excessive and impracticable, set in against trade combination; compulsory isolation was established under the false name of freedom of work, and in consequence the weak were abandoned to the mercy of the strong, and the poor to the mercy of the rich; the individual, naked and unarmed, was put face to face with the individual armed at every point; in the economic domain a mere agglomeration was substituted for any kind of organization. But besides being the culminating point of a long evolution, this reaction was the starting-point of a new development which created the modern Labour Movement. We must next take a rapid survey of Europe and see what was the fate of the guilds in other countries.

In Holland, where they had never been very strong, they counted for nothing after 1766. In Tuscany, from 1759 to 1766, a great inquiry was held into the state of the Arti, and following on the information obtained, the Archduke Peter-Leopold brought about, by means of decrees, a reform which was revolutionary in character. On February 3, 1770, he abolished enrolment fees throughout the duchy, with the exception of two or three small territories like that of Livurnia, and decided that, in order to ply a trade, it should be enough henceforth to be inscribed once and for all on a general register. In consideration of a fee of £2 at most, a man might, if he wanted to, follow more than one calling or open several shops. The only exceptions were the doctors, apothecaries, and goldsmiths, who were still subject to special obligations, and silk manufacturers, who kept a few ancient privileges. On February 17 of that year all the guild tribunals were abolished and all their powers vested in a Chamber of Commerce, Arts, and Manufactures, which had not only legal rights but also the duty of watching over the economic interests of the country, encouraging and assisting poor craftsmen, and administering the estates formerly held by the guilds which had thus been wiped out at a stroke of the pen. The clauses are curious and confirm what we have said concerning the action of princes. The Archduke expresses his wish that “such matters shall be regulated by a single authority, on fixed and uniform principles directed to the universal good of the State.” The bakers were no longer compelled to make loaves of a fixed weight; the merchants were exempted from paying for weights and measures which they hardly ever used but which they were forced to possess.[145] The glorious guilds of Florence had lived for centuries and were to leave their mark behind them for a long time to come; it was only in 1907 that the winding-up of the property which had belonged to the Arte della Lana was concluded.

In Lombardy, from 1771 onwards, under the rule of the Empress Maria Theresa, a similar reform took place; in 1786 it was Sicily’s turn; throughout the rest of Italy, all that remained of the ancient guild system disappeared under the French domination and the Napoleonic Code. The same thing happened in Belgium, where, after the decree of 17 Brumaire, Year IV., nothing was left but shadowy guilds, such as that of St. Arnoldus at Bruges, or the “Nations” at Antwerp.[146] In Germany the guild system was more tenacious and was only to disappear, in certain States, when German unity was almost realized. The Code of the Confederation of Northern Germany declared for its abolition in all the countries under its jurisdiction.

3. The guilds, then, were long in dying, and in addition to a few survivals,[147] there were even some attempts made here and there to revive them during the nineteenth century.

In France, from the days of the Consulate and of the Empire, professional guilds (notaries, lawyers, solicitors, law-court officers, stockbrokers, etc.) were formed and still exist. The practice of more than one profession—such as medicine, dispensing, printing—remained under the control of the public authority. Butchers and bakers, under new regulations, remained in this state till 1858 and 1863. In 1805, three hundred wine-sellers demanded, without success, the restoration of the old craft guilds and of their own in particular. Under the Restoration, which undertook the task of restoring institutions which the storms of the Revolution had destroyed, other petitions of the same nature found a few partisans in the “Chambre Introuvable” and in some of the General Councils;[148] but although “the small” crafts were in favour of this return to the past, “great” trade, which had been hostile to wardenships and masterships, was strongly opposed to it. The Chamber of Commerce of Paris and the bankers were among the first to fight and defeat these ideas.

It is among Catholics especially that such ideas have been awakened; inspired by sincere pity for the misery of the working classes who have been so long without protection, they have often been filled with the desire to create an organization for the propagation of social peace between masters and workers. During the reign of Louis-Philippe, Buchez, Villeneuve Bargemont, La Farelle, and Buret tried to bring the guild idea to life again. In 1848 it publicly reappeared for a short time, when the provisional government received hundreds of deputations classed according to their trades, and Louis Blanc nominated, according to craft guilds, delegates for the Commission of the Luxembourg, and when compagnonnage paraded its beribboned canes and splendid works of art in the processions of the republican festivals; but it was already modified; masters and workmen formed separate groups. More recently, in 1891, it has been advocated in eloquent but vague terms by Pope Leo XIII., and Catholic circles, founded by M. de Mun, have tried to put it into practice.

But it has always encountered obstacles which have arrested its progress. First there have been disagreements between those who favour the idea. Should the guild be optional or compulsory, open or closed? What share should masters and workmen take in it? Should it aim only at mutual assistance, or should it be competent to act in disputes between members? On the one hand there were those who were afraid of reviving the tyrannical monopoly of the old wardenships and on the other those who were afraid of forming, without meaning to do so, the framework for a socialistic organization of labour. All this was enough to paralyse those who might have been willing to join. But there was an even greater difficulty; though some of the great employers, those of the Val des Bois for example, supported the cause, the working classes, not unreasonably, stood aloof, uneasy and defiant. They dreaded any sort of patronage in which the heads would bombard them with pious exhortations and hold up to them the dismal virtue of resignation; they remembered M. Claudio Jannet’s confession that he looked to Christianity “to solve the social question by inspiring masters with the spirit of justice and charity, and by making the less-favoured classes accept their lot.” They could not forget that the Holy Father had written that the guilds should have “religion for their guide,” and they thought they had a foretaste of the fate in store for them, in the statutes of association of the printer-bookseller-bookbinders of Paris in the new model (1879): “Art. III. To belong a man must be a Catholic. Art. IV. Must bind himself not to work, or employ another on Sunday. Art. V. To print no irreligious book.” In short, they were afraid of putting themselves under the yoke of the confessional and of losing their liberty of thought, and they looked on an institution from which were excluded in advance all who did not hold a certificate of orthodoxy, as too much resembling the Middle Ages, and as an anachronism in a society where rights are equal for all citizens irrespective of religion.

A few theorists[149] no doubt prided themselves on enlarging this narrow conception; but the compulsory guilds, open and federated, which they dreamed of instituting, were so different from the old guilds that there was really nothing in common except the name.

It was in Austria, in surroundings less cut off from the past than in France, that guilds more resembling the original type awoke to an appearance of life.[150] Created by law in 1883, they have set before themselves some of the aims of the Arti of Florence, viz. the safeguarding of the honour of the trade and, to this end, the regulation of apprenticeship; the foundation or assistance of institutions for technical instruction; the exaction of a preliminary examination from any one who wishes to set up as a craftsman or merchant; the buying of raw material at the expense of the community; the provision of arbitrators to settle trade differences, and the insurance of members against sickness, etc. They even try, as in old times, to secure the legal monopoly of a craft and to forbid hawking, etc. They remind one very much of what I have called the capitalistic guilds of the Middle Ages, and those of great commerce and “great” industry, with the sole difference that they are compulsory for all who carry on the same trade. (See p. 28.) All the authority, in fact, is in the hands of the masters, and although they are reminded of their duties towards the workers, the latter are subordinate, can only present petitions, and are only allowed to decide as to the administration of benefit funds. It is more than doubtful whether this reproduction of the most hierarchical form of the ancient guilds has much chance of spreading at a time when ideas of equality have made such headway and when the working classes are strong enough to refuse meekly to submit to the conditions employers lay down. It must also be remembered that “great” industry, for and by whom this method was formerly designed, is excepted from Austrian legislation, which forces it on the “small” trades, to which this renewal of the regulations of the old statutes seems to be a great hindrance. Imitation of this system, which is itself only a more or less successful imitation, has so far not gone farther than Hungary and Germany (the Innungen). In Belgium, Switzerland, and even in France, Christian associations are to be found on the same model. They always include two groups which never assimilate; masters and workmen who have separate representation and pay unequal subscriptions. The principle is always Charity, the devotion of one class to another, no doubt an honourable sentiment, but one with which is mingled a protective spirit it seems impossible to do away with. For Pope Leo XIII. himself, in his Encyclical of May 16, 1891, states that, in civilized society, it is impossible that every one shall rise to the same level, and that, in consequence, there will always be rich and poor. “Just as, in the human body, the members, in spite of their diversity, adapt themselves so marvellously to each other as to form a perfectly proportioned whole, which may be called symmetrical, so, in society, the two classes are destined by nature to unite in harmony, and to maintain together a perfect balance.” Life and experience, however, would seem to prove the opposite. The only thing to be gained by these attempts to return to a time that has disappeared for ever is the combination of crafts—a necessity which seeks to-day, as it has always done, its legitimate satisfaction. But new methods of production and sale demand new forms of organization of sellers and producers, and have brought us to the system, evolved by those concerned, spontaneously, without prejudiced or preconceived theories, by the direct force of circumstances—the system of Trade Unionism, which has succeeded the guild system as the defender of trade interests.

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