branches grow up instead of the old ones, or the small industry, taking advantage of a mechanical motor, assumes a new form. We thus find it endowed with an astonishing vitality. It undergoes various modifications, it adapts itself to new conditions, it struggles without losing hope of better times to come. Anyhow, it has not the characteristics of a decaying institution. In some industries the factory is undoubtedly victorious; but there are other branches in which the petty trades hold their own position. Even in the textile industries — especially in consequence of the wide use of the labour of children and women — which offer so many advantages for the factory system, the hand-loom still competes with the power-loom.
As a whole, the transformation of the petty trades into great industries goes on with a slowness which cannot fail to astonish even those who are convinced of its necessity. Nay, sometimes we may even see the reverse movement going on — occasionally, of course, and only for a time. I cannot forget my amazement when I saw at Verviers, some thirty years ago, that most of the woollen cloth factories — immense barracks facing the streets by more than a hundred windows each — were silent, and their costly machinery was rusting, while cloth was woven in hand-looms in the weavers’ houses, for the owners of those very same factories. Here we have of course, but a temporary fact, fully explained by the spasmodic character of the trade and the heavy losses sustained by the owners of the factories when they cannot run their mills all the year round. But it illustrates the obstacles which the transformation has to comply with. As to the silk trade, it continues to spread over Europe in its rural industry state; while hundreds of new petty trades appear every year, and when they find nobody to carry them on in the villages — as is the case in this country — they shelter themselves in the suburbs of the great cities, as we have lately learned from the inquiry into