Attempts were made to stop the disturbances in the trade by the intervention of the government. This intervention was entirely on the side of the masters. The journeymen were forbidden to do anything whatever to injure the masters or to impede their business and they were denied the limitation of apprentices for which they had asked. Guild regulations limited the number of apprentices taken in other industries and it seemed only reasonable to the journeyman that similar regulations should obtain among the printers, but the royal authority was constantly exercised against them. This attempted settlement by royal authority was immediately followed by still more serious strikes. The masters complained that the agitation was due to the pernicious activity of labor leaders and invoked the royal edicts. The journeymen alleged abuses, claimed their rights, and undertook to enforce them by combination. The royal authority was exercised in the effort to coerce the journeymen even to the point of threatening by an edict of 1617 that workmen who interfered with the conduct of their master’s business should be put to death. This, however, was the last expiring effort of the old order of things. In the next year, 1618, a royal edict organized the trade and prescribed the regulations under which it should be conducted. This organization, which we shall proceed to study in detail, was the basis of the conduct of the printing industry in France until 1789. It did not bring industrial peace and it did not remedy all existing evils. As we shall see, the history of printing is a history of industrial conflict throughout the whole period until 1789. Henceforth, however, the regulation of the trade, the establishment of a responsible organization, and the fixing of regulations between masters and men changed the field of strife. We hear little or nothing more of strikes. The state was recognized as the source of regulation and as the arbiter of questions which might arise between the associated employers on one hand and their partially associated employees on the other. The industrial struggles hereafter took the form of litigation rather than of strikes. The outlaw industry at last obtained a recognized, responsible position in the industrial world. CHAPTER VI THE COMMUNITY OF PRINTERS An unregulated trade, conducted under conditions of absolute freedom approximating those of the present day, was not only out of place in the Middle Ages but was practically impossible. We have seen how the attempt to carry on a trade under such conditions resulted in a state of intolerable confusion in the printing industry. Accordingly a royal edict was issued by King Louis XII supplying the needed regulations for the conduct of the industry according to seventeenth century ideas.