regions especially, where the winter is long and no work on the land is possible for several months every year, this form of small industries is widely spread. In this country, on the contrary, we find the opposite extreme. Few small industries have survived in England in connection with land-culture; but hundreds of petty trades are found in the suburbs and the slums of the great cities, and large portions of the populations of several towns, such as Sheffield and Birmingham, find their living in a variety of petty trades. Between these two extremes there is evidently a mass of intermediate forms, according to the more or less close ties which continue to exist with the land. Large villages, and even towns, are thus peopled with workers who are engaged in small trades, but most of whom have a small garden, or an orchard, or a field, or only retain some rights of pasture on the commons, while part of them live exclusively upon their industrial earnings.
With regard to the sale of the produce, the small industries offer the same variety of organisation. Here again there are two great branches. In one of them the worker sells his produce directly to the wholesale dealer; cabinetmakers, weavers, and workers in the toy trade are in this case. In the other great division the worker works for a “master” who either sells the produce to a wholesale dealer, or simply acts as a middleman who himself receives his orders from some big concern. This the “sweating system,” property speaking, under which we find a mass of small trades. Part of the toy trade, the tailors who work for large clothing establishments — very often for those of the State — the women who sew and embroider the “uppers” for the boot and shoe factories, and who as often deal with the factory as with an intermediary “sweater,” and so on, are in this case. All possible gradations of feudalisation and subfeudalisation of labour are evidently found in that organisation of the sale of the produce.
Again, when the