KROPOTKIN documents in the officesof king and parliament. We see the English parliament literally inundated with these thousands of petty local ~quabbles. It then became necessary to have thousands of functionaries in the capital (venal for the greater part) to classify, read and judge all these documents, to regulate the way to forge a horses's hoof, bleach linen, salt herrings, make a barrel, and so on ad infinitum. But this was not all. Soon the State laid hands on exportation, in which it saw a means of enrichment. Formerly, when a dispute arose between two towns about the value of exported cloth, the purity of wool, or the capacity of barrels of herrings, the two towns made remonstrances to each other. If the dispute lasted long, they addressed themselves to a third town to step in as arbitrator (this happened constantly); or a congress of guilds of weavers and coopers was convened to regulate internationally the quality and value of cloth or the capacity of barrels. Now, however, the State had stepped in and taken upon itself to regulate all these contentions from the centre, in Paris or in London. Through its functionaries it regulated the capacity of barrels, specified the quality of cloth, orderedthe number of threads and their thickness in the warp and woof and interfered in the smallest detail of each industry. You know the result. Industry µnder this control was dying out in the eighteenth century. What bad become of Benvenuto Cellini's an under State tutelage? Vanished. And the architecture of those guilds of masons and carpenters whose works we still admire? Only look at the hideous monuments of the State period, and at one glance you will know that architecture was dead, so dead that up till now it has not recovered from the blow dealt it by the State. What became of the fabrics of Bruges, of the cloth from Holland? What became of those blacksmiths, skilled.in manipulating iron, who, in each European borough, knew how to tum this ungrateful metal into the most exquisite decorations? What became of those turners, those clock-makers, those fitters who had made Nuremberg one of the glories of the Middle Ages by their instruments of precision? James Watt looked in vain during thirty years for a man who could make a .fairlyround cylinder for his steam engine, and his machine remained thirty years a rough model for want of workmen to construct it! . Such was the result of State interference in the domain of industry. All that the State managed to do was to tighten the screw on the worker, depopulate the land,· sow misery in the towns and reduce thousands of beings to the state of starvelings and impose industrial slavery. . It is these miserable wrecks of ancient guilds, these organisms mangled and oppressed by the State that "scientific" economists have the ignorance to confound with the guilds of the Middle Ages! 38 Bibi oteca G:no Bianco
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