tainty that he would be killed if he did not.

Let us, however, consider a more advanced kind of association, that of
men united for purposes of trade and profit. The craftsman of the
town, who made things and sold them, found out by the experience of
some generations that his only chance, if he would not become a slave,
was to combine with others who made the same things for the same
purposes. He therefore formed--here in London, as early as the Saxon
times an association for the protection of his craft--a
rough-and-ready association at first, a religious guild or fraternity,
something which should persuade men to come together as friends, not
rivals, what we should now call a benefit society, gradually
developing into an association of officers, a constitution, and rules;
growing by slow degrees into a powerful and wealthy body, having its
period of birth, development, vigour, and decay. In illustration of
such an association, I will sketch out for you the history of a
certain London Company--what was called a Craft Company; a society of
working-men who were engaged upon the same craft; who all made the
same thing: as the Company of Bowyers who made bows, or of Fletchers
who made arrows. The society began first of all with a Guild of the
Craft, such as I have just mentioned; that is to say, all those who
belonged to the Craft--according to the custom of the time, they all
lived in the same quarter and were well known to each other--were
persuaded or compelled to belong to the Guild. Here religion stepped
in, for every Guild had its own patron saint, and if a craftsman stood
aloof, he lost the protection and incurred the displeasure of that
saint, so that, apart from considerations of the common weal, terror
of how the offended saint might punish the blackleg forced men to
join. Thus, St. George protected the armourers; St. Mary and St.
Thomas the Martyr, the bowyers; St. Catharine the Virgin, the
haberdashers; St. Martin, the sadlers; the Virgin Mary, the
cloth-workers, and so on. On the saint's day they marched in
procession to the parish church and heard Mass; every year each man
paid his fees of membership; the Guild looked after the sick and
maintained the aged of the Craft. The next step, which was not taken
until after many years, and was not at first contemplated, was to
obtain for the Guild--_i.e._, for the Craft--a Royal Charter. This
favour of the Sovereign conferred certain powers of regulating their
trade