namesake on the Wiltshire Avon was in those days at least as important a centre of the clothing industry. The broadcloth of the Gloucestershire valleys, 161 Devonshire and Hampshire kersies, Witney blankets and Chipping Norton tweeds, meant sweet grass and long wool, with a little water-power, and not coal, to turn the fulling-mills, to which material to be worked up was to be brought from the four quarters of the globe.
The apparent condition of labour in those days seems almost idyllic, compared with what it now is; but it must be remembered that then as now the worker was in the hands, of the monopolist of land and raw material; nor was it likely that the latter should have held his special privilege for two hundred years without applying some system whereby to develop and increase it.
Between the period of the decay of the craft-guilds and this latter half of the eighteenth century there had grown up a system of labour which could not have been applied to the mediæval workmen; for they worked for themselves and not for a master or exploiter, and thus were masters of their material, their tools and their time. This system is that of Division of Labour; under it the unit of labour is not an individual man, 162 but a group, every member of which is helpless by himself, but trained by constant practice to the repetition of a small part of the work, acquires great precision and speed in its performance. In short, each man is not so much a machine as a part of a machine. For example, it takes five men to make a glass bottle: it is the group of these five men that makes the bottle, not any one of them. It is clear that under this system the individual workman is entirely at the mercy of his master the capitalist in his capacity of superintender of labour: in order not to be crushed by him, he must combine to oppose his own interests to those of his employer.
It was by this method, then, that the demands of the growing world-market were supplied down to the end of the eighteenth century. The