price of each slightly spoiled piece of clothing being deducted from their very low piecework wages.
And, finally, there is the small workshop (often with hired wheel-power) in which a master employs three to ten workers, who are paid in wages, and sells his produce to a bigger employer or merchant — there being all possible gradations between such a workshop and the small factory in which a few time workers (five, ten to twenty) are employed by an independent producer. In the textile trades, weaving is often done either by the family or by a master who employs one boy only, or several weavers, and after having received the yarn from a big employer, pays a skilled workman to put the yarn in the loom, invents what is necessary for weaving a given, sometimes very complicated pattern, and after having woven the cloth or the ribbons in his own loom or in a loom which he hires himself, he is paid for the piece of cloth according to a very complicated scale of wages agreed to between masters and workers. This last form, we shall see presently, is widely spread up to the present day, especially in the woolen and silk trades; it continues to exist by the side of big factories in which 50, 100, or 5,000 wage-workers, as the case may be, are working with the employers’ machinery and are paid in time-wages so much the day or the week.
The small industries are thus quite a world,129 which, remarkable enough, continues to exist even in the most industrial countries, side by side with the big factories. Into this world we must now penetrate to cast a glimpse upon it: a glimpse only, because it would take volumes to describe its infinite variety of pursuits and organisations, and its indefinitely varied connection, with agriculture as well as with other industries.
Most of the petty trades, except some of those which are connected with agriculture, are, we must admit, in a very precarious position. The earnings are very low, and the employment is often uncertain.