is very much subdivided in that part of France, and great numbers of peasants own but from two to three acres per family, or even less. Consequently, in thirty villages round Nogent, about 5,000 men are engaged in cutlery, chiefly of the highest sort (artistic knives are occasionally sold at as much as £20 a piece), while the lower sorts are fabricated in the neighbourhoods of Thiers, in Puy-de-Dome (Auvergne). The Nogent industry has developed spontaneously, with no aid from without, and in its technical part it shows considerable progress.158 At Thiers, where the cheapest sorts of cutlery are made, the division of labour, the cheapness of rent for small workshops supplied with motive power from the Durolle river, or from small gas motors, the aid of a great variety of specially invented machine-tools, and the existing combination of machine-work with hand-work have resulted in such a perfection of the technical part of the trade that it is considered doubtful whether the factory system could further economise labour.159 For twelve miles round Thiers, in each direction, all the streamlets are dotted with small work-shops, in which peasants, who continue to cultivate their fields, are at work.
Basket-making is again an important cottage industry in several parts of France, namely in Aisne and in Haute Marne. In this last department, at Villaines, everyone is a basketmaker, “and all the basketmakers belong to a co-operative society,” Ardouin Dumazet remarks.160 “There are no employers; all the produce is brought once a fortnight to the co-operative stores and there it is sold for the association. About 150 families belong to it, and each owns a house and some vineyards.” At Fays-Billot, also in Haute Marne, 1,500 basket-makers belong to an association; while at Thiérache, where several thousand men are engaged in the same trade, no association has been formed, the earnings being in consequence extremely low.
Another very important centre of petty trades is the French Jura, or the French part of the Jura Mountains, where the watch trade has attained, as known, a high development. When 1 visited these villages between