One can appreciate in it both the variety of the small. industries which are carried on in French towns and the skill and inventing powers of the workers. And the question necessarily arises: Must all this skill, all this intelligence, be swept away by the factory, instead of becoming a new fertile source of progress under a better organisation of production? must all this independence and inventiveness of the worker disappear before the factory levelling? and, if it must, would such a transformation be a progress, as so many economists who have only studied figures and not human beings are ready to maintain?
At anyrate, it is quite certain that even if the absorption of the French petty trades by the big factories were possible — which seems extremely doubtful — the absorption would not be accomplished so soon as that. The small industry of Paris fights hard for its maintenance, and it shows its vitality by the numberless machine-tools which are continually invented by the workers for improving and cheapening the produce.
The numbers of motors which were exhibited at the last exhibitions in the Galerie du travail bear a testimony to the fact that a cheap motor, for the small industry, is one of the leading problems of the day. Motors weighing only forty-five lb., including the boiler, were exhibited in 1889 to answer that want. Small two-horsepower engines, fabricated by the engineers of the Jura (formerly watch-makers) in their small works-hops, were at that time another attempt to solve the problemto say nothing of the water, gas and. electrical motors. 168 The transmission of steam-power to 230 small workshops which was made by the Société des Immeubles industriels was another attempt in the same direction, and the increasing efforts of the French engineers for finding out the best means of transmitting and subdividing power by means of compressed air, “tole-dynamic cables,” and electricity are indicative of the endeavours of the small industry to retain its ground in the face of the competition of the factories. (See Appendix V.)
Such are the small industries in France, as