Page:The Evolution of Modern Capitalism.djvu/40
20 THE EVOLUTION OF
dustrial machinery may appear attributable to the ““chance”
which assigns to some ages and countries a large crop of
inventive geniuses, and denies it to other ages and countries.
A more scientific view of history explains the slow growth
of mechanical invention by the presence of factors un-
favourable to, and the absence of factors favourable to, the
application of human intelligence to definite points of
mechanical progress. The vested interests and conservative
methods of existing industrial castes and their guild or-
ganisations rendered the medizeval city poor soil for the
introduction of ‘‘labour saving” machinery or other revolu-
tionary experiments: the small dimensions of markets,
confined partly by political, partly by natural restrictions,
presented no opportunities for the profitable disposal of
large outputs. No great “‘free” labour market existed in
the medieval town; the ambition and the trained capacity
of the business organiser had little opportunity of dis-
covering and asserting themselves in an age when education
was almost wholly confined to classes who regarded with
disdain the useful arts and crafts. In times when the early
thirst for gold and the zest of physical inquiry absorbed
men of “science” and intellectual ingenuity in “alchemy”
and problems of perpetual motion, there was no
‘““conduction” of intelligence along the humbler paths of
detailed mechanical improvement in the useful arts.
The force of these unfavourable factors is made more manifest by the fact that single examples of successful capitalist organisation upon a tolerably large scale did actually occur in the later Middle Ages in a few instances, where machinery had come into play. The printing trade showed an early tendency to concentration in large capitalist businesses, attributable to the expensive “fixed” capital in presses. At the end of the fifteenth century we find in Niirnberg a large printing business with twenty-four presses and a hundred employees —type-setters, printers, correctors, binders, etc. So likewise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we find paper-mills in Nurnberg and Basel on a capitalistic basis. In Bologna, as early as 1341, we find accounts of large spinning-mills worked by water-power, and even where no non-human power was available, the com- parative expensiveness of the distaffs and looms helped to establish mills in which large bodies of workers were.