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ORGANIZATION OF GUILDS AND CRAFTS.

vations of quick-witted employes has been the determination to ameliorate their condition by a union of their interests against the employer, and thus, by removing competition for his favor, to treat with him upon more satisfactory bases.

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Although the existence of organizations called guilds and crafts was of early date in Germany and England, yet the natural war between labor and capital has until recently been waged with its most remarkable persistence in France, the poor man being directed and advised by some of the most selfabnegating philanthropists in the history of the world, although their systems were usually contrived for the adjudication of the conflicting interests of angels instead of men.

At the head of this rank of reformers stands a French nobleman named Saint Simon. It had been the lot of his family at an earlier period to have furnished to the world one of the most bitter and implacable enemies of the common people ever born into the world, and a peculiar retribution is afforded in the life of the philanthropist who followed the haughty patrician. This reformer was born at Paris, Oct. 17, 1760. The prejudices of his family seem to have affected his opinions in a manner akin to the reverse action of excessive religious influences surrounding many a minister's boy, and he entered the world, although a nobleman, yet an ardent advocate of the great leveling of titles which came with the French Revolution. Passing through the vicissitudes of the Revolution, and reaching the age of 38, he began a costly course of scientific education, convinced that the regeneration of mankind depended upon his unaided efforts. Having accumulated a great fortune, he dispensed it with the prodigality of Timon of Athens, yet without becoming a hater of men in the swiftfollowing days of adversity. Having become thoroughly infatuated with the belief that he was the most powerful reformer who had come upon the world at that age, he formulated the following plan of extending to a later day an influence so salutary over the affairs of men: The husband of Madame de Stael had just died. Saint Simon having divorced himself from his own wife, appeared before the most celebrated lady of that age and said with all frankness and sincerity:

"Madam, you are the most extraordinary woman in the world, as I am the most extraordinary man; without doubt there would be born to us a child still more extraordinary." The rejection of this brilliant marital opportunity by Madame de Stael drove Saint Simon to Geneva, Switzerland, where he elaborated and published a social programme which contemplated several important changes not yet accomplished. For instance, he believed that Christianity had been diverted from its original purpose. It had shown a cruel indifference to the amelioration of the physical condition of the poor, whereas genuine Christianity embraced in its consideration all the needs of humanity, and ought to direct all the social forces toward the succor of the class which is at once the most numerous and the most indigent. He therefore believed the spiritual power should be vested in learned men, and that there should be an annual subscription for the benefit of men of genius mathematicians, physicians, chemists, physiologists, painters, literary men and musicians. The Government should be intrusted to the landed proprietors, while "Chiefs of Humanity," elected by the popular vote, should dominate everything. After the fulmination of these views he came extremely near starving. Falling very ill through hunger and cold, his family finally rescued him, and, upon his return to Paris, disciples flocked around him in flattering numbers. Yet again becoming miserably poor through the expenses of his many publications, he fired a pistol at himself and put out one of his eyes. Still, he lived two years longer, continuing to promulgate doctrines which, from the number and prominence of their adherents, may be said to have been the primary foundations of real Communism, upon which Karl Marx, architect, and Proudhon, Lassalle and Engels, master-builders, have erected their formidable citadel.

In the same age, and passing through the same awful national crisis, lived Fourier, a man who devoted his patrimony and the frugal savings of a life of toil to the development and publication of the following scheme: "The people of the earth should be divided into communities of 400 families, or 1,800 persons, which number he believed to include the whole circle of human

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capacities. These should live in one immense edifice, in the centre of a large and highly-cultivated domain. This edifice should be furnished with work-shops, studios, and all the appliances of industry and art, as well as all the sources of amusement and pleasure. After the earth should have become covered with these edifices, they should form a grand unit of Government. The property in each edifice should be held in shares, and the yearly product be divided into twelve parts, of which five should go to labor, four to capital, and three to talent. The apartments in each edifice should be of various prices, and the styles of living vary in luxury and cost, but the poorest person in each edifice would not only be secure of comfort, but his enjoyments would be greater than the present wasteful manner of living can give to princes and millionaires, while the latter would secure advantages of which the mind can now have little conception. The saving effected by living on a plan so co-operative would reduce the expenses twothirds, while the scientific application of industry would quadruple the products of civilization." On account of the cooperative peculiarities which give all the weight there is to this plan, there were at one period many people who believed it would be an improvement upon the present system. But poor Fourier died in disappointment and despair, without living to see the practical failures which have resulted from various attempts, both in France and the United States, to engraft his ideas upon the social customs of the age.

The French National Assembly, on the 4th of August, 1789, solemnly abrogated feudal and manorial rights. The class so long privileged at the expense of the peasant fled from their lands to wander for twenty years in foreign climes, doomed to never recover their estates. A vast hierarchy, with its grip upon a great portion of the realty of the nation, was also deposed, and its properties opened to the ownership of any citizen having confidence and sagacity. Then it was that the first exhibition of general and governmental Communism was offered to humanity. The rapid morcellement, or parceling, of the wide domains of France to the proprietary agriculturist increased the French land-owners, within fifty years, by the

enormous number of 5,000,000. Now, as this was an experiment; as the total saved product of land cannot, where all are owners (using of their own production so much as may suit them in each individual case), equal the savings where there is but one owner, who makes all the rest save in order to give a share to him; and as the broad landed estates of Great Britain presented another chance for a similar social experiment, there has been, since 1789, the sincerest desire on the part of British aristocrats that the great Communistic decree of the French Revolution might eventually prove inoperative and even abortive in a true economical sense - that is, fail to secure the greatest good of the greatest number. A long summary of the hard battles which have been fought over this very ground cannot be attempted. A sample of one argument of the aristocrats was furnished in a book by Mounier, padded and stuffed by Rubichon, both Frenchmen, which John Stuart Mill cites because of its having been benignly recommended by the Quarterly Review, in 1846, as unquestioned authority. In this work, after considering the division of landed property in France, it is confidently proclaimed that "in a few years the Code Napoleon will be employed in dividing fractions of square inches of land, and deciding by logarithms infinitesimal inheritances." The arguments in refutation of this aristocratic proposition need not be recounted. The plain fact stands forth to-day that the French people are the thriftiest and wealthiest in Europe, taken one at a time, although they have passed through more political trouble than any other nation of the modern world. The fact that the great break-up of lands turned out a natural blessing has inspired the anarchists, who now hear the general acknowledgment of the truth, with the determination to force another dose of chaos down the throats of unwilling humanity.

In 1839, the workingmen of France were greatly enraged at the tendency, through competition and a population rapidly increasing, toward a much lower rate of wages, and the book of Louis Blanc, entitled "The Organization of Labor," at once attracted and secured their unqualified approval. Its author was one of the most accomplished of French writers,

and the brilliancy and energy with which he attacked the present conditions of society secured him a popularity which he has retained in his old age, as is evinced on every occasion which brings him before the public. Hatred of caste and competition was the sentiment which inspired "The Organization of Labor." In business rivalry Louis Blanc beheld all vices, and the source of all evils. He urged its immediate suppression. More competition among manufacturers, or even merchants, excites each to produce and sell at a better bargain than his rival. The desire of workmen to outdo each. other in the favor of the employer, either by more disinterested devotion or less adequate remuneration, thereby forcing all other employes to those artifices, gradually hampers the recognized rights of the toiler and reduces the pay which he receives. Upon forecasting the final results of the social system, Louis Blanc conceived that the present relations of wages and capital could only be kept up during the prevalence of ignorance among the working-classes, and that, whenever the intelligence of the laborer advanced sufficiently, he would, with bloody hands, throw off the yoke which galled him, and repeat, through the natural advance of what is called Christian civilization, the Reign of Terror brought about at the French Revolution by the accumulation of mountains of governmental injustices. Therefore, desiring the education. of the masses of the people, and believing that same education not compatible with the peaceful working of the present system, he pronounced against society as now organized, and cried out for its immediate reconstitution upon a basis securing to all a comfortable existence, compelling all to labor for precisely the same compensation, and regarding nothing useful which does not conduce directly to an easier and more comfortable physical existence. It was not considered important by this theorist that the numbers of the population should be limited by any means short of starvation, and he exhibited a Frenchy horror of Dr. Malthus, who had at that time stirred up the world by the promulgation of a doctrine that man must limit his breeding of human creatures if he would successfully improve their condition. The idea that a poor man should not have the