, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of
payment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern
Trades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do,
upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world
in the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass.
There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant
his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a
nameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very tools
of life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and pots
and pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed not by
devils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent
systems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.

That the most mediaeval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not
fight for the same ideal of aesthetic finish is true and certainly
tragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the
tragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property,
seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character
of their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property,
seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is,
of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly
be said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community in
which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should
not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, and
three men had harems. A married community means a community where most
people are married; not a community where one or two people are very
much married. A propertied community means a community where most people
have property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in
fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and
peasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that
the Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment.
The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the
period, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the different
value of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of
ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in
no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where th