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Updated: June 15, 2025
I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society. The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think, follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages.
Circumstances, amongst others the fact that the community to which they attached themselves had already adopted commerce and thus become a guild of merchants, led to the differentiation of industrial functions amongst the new-comers, and thus to the establishment of craft-guilds.
In one case, that of the strike of bakers towards the close of the fifteenth century, at Colmar in Elsass, the craft-guilds supported the journeymen in their protest against a certain action of the patrician Rath, which they considered to be a derogation from their dignity. Like the masters, the journeymen had their own guild-house, and their own solemn functions and social gatherings.
Secondly, there were the trade-guilds, which embraced the guilds-merchant, and the craft-guilds. The latter were associations of workmen, for maintaining the customs of their craft, each with a master, or alderman, and other officers. They had their provisions for mutual help for themselves and for their widows and orphans, and they had their religious observances.
The latter class was now becoming an important and turbulent factor in the life of the larger cities. The craft-guilds, consisting of the body of non-patrician citizens, were naturally in general dominated by their most wealthy section.
And after all, these craft-guilds are usually faithful performers, and well worth conciliating. Or take the occupation of landscape-gardening. You want a pretty garden; and you hire a professional gardener who comes to you well recommended. He makes the garden; and you pay his price.
Recently I have come in contact here in America with several cases where the workmen themselves have broken away from the old ways and have actually established what are to all intents and purposes craft-guilds, without in the least realizing that they were doing this.
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