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The chambers of the innkeeper and of travelers occupied three stories; the ground floor was devoted to a wine shop and an eating-place. Sailors, carriers, handicraftsmen, and in general the poorer class of travelers ate and drank in a courtyard which had a mosaic pavement and a linen roof resting on columns, so that all guests might be under inspection.
The children of the wealthier classes enjoyed great facilities for education in all the great capitals. The classics, music, and the modern languages, particularly the French, were universally cultivated. Nor was intellectual cultivation confined to the higher orders. On the contrary, it was diffused to a remarkable degree among the hard-working artisans and handicraftsmen of the great cities.
A new municipal constitution, supported by the magistracy, made strange inroads on the rights of the citizens and the domain of social life; a common chest, containing the revenues of the Church, was utilised for advancing money without interest to needy handicraftsmen, and making loans to other townsmen at a low rate of interest.
It was proposed also that for the encouragement of all the handicraftsmen and labouring poor who, either as servants or as labourers for day-work, assisted the farmers or other tradesmen, they should have every man three acres of ground given them, with leave to build cottages upon the same, the allotments to be upon the waste at the end of the cross-roads where they entered the town.
Holtzapffel's elaborately illustrated treatise was written quite as much for amateurs as for working mechanics. Among other noble handicraftsmen we may mention the late Lord Douglas, who cultivated bookbinding. Lord Traquair's fancy was cutlery, and one could not come to him in a more welcome fashion than with a pair of old razors to set up.
Old master carried the keys of all store houses; measured out the allowance for each slave at the end of every month; superintended the storing of all goods brought to the plantation; dealt out the raw material to all the handicraftsmen; shipped the grain, tobacco, and all saleable produce of the plantation to market, and had the general oversight of the coopers' shop, wheelwrights' shop, blacksmiths' shop, and shoemakers' shop.
As far as they were handicraftsmen, they were competing with a vastly cheaper and better form of manufacture; as far as they were farmers, they were doing the same thing with regard to agriculture.
The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served an industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the mechanician, were not similarly refractory under the discipline of devoutness.
I know that I am expressing the opinion of some of the largest as well as the most enlightened employers of labour, when I say that there is a real danger that, from the extreme of no education, we may run to the other extreme of over-education of handicraftsmen. And I apprehend that what is true for the ordinary hand-worker is true for the foreman.
This aversion they probably inherit from the ancient inhabitants, the Bedouins, who, as I have remarked, exclude, to this day, all handicraftsmen from their tribes, and consider those who settle in their encampment as of an inferior cast, with whom they neither associate nor intermarry.
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