So that on the one
hand industry and wealth, on the other population and misery,
advance, so to speak, in procession, one always dragging the
other after it.
I have shown the contractor, at the birth of industry,
negotiating on equal terms with his comrades, who have since
become HIS WORKMEN. It is plain, in fact, that this original
equality was bound to disappear through the advantageous position
of the master and the dependence of the wage-workers. In vain
does the law assure to each the right of enterprise, as well as
the faculty to labor alone and sell one's products directly.
According to the hypothesis, this last resource is impracticable,
since it was the object of the workshop to annihilate isolated
labor. And as for the right to take the plough, as they say, and
go at speed, it is the same in manufactures as in agriculture; to
know how to work is nothing, it is necessary to arrive at the
right time; the shop, as well as the land, is to the first comer.
When an establishment has had the leisure to develop itself,
enlarge its foundations, ballast itself with capital, and assure
itself a body of patrons, what can the workman who has only
his arms do against a power so superior? Hence it was not by an
arbitrary act of sovereign power or by fortuitous and brutal
usurpation that the guilds and masterships were established in
the Middle Ages: the force of events had created them long before
the edicts of kings could have given them legal consecration;
and, in spite of the reform of '89, we see them reestablishing
themselves under our eyes with an energy a hundred times more
formidable.
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