The hard work and long hours had two compensations; one partial, the other very real. The first, which printing shared with other industries, was the great number of holidays. The shops did not work on Sundays or feast days. Under modern conditions there are slightly more than 300 working days in the year, taking out Sundays and holidays and making no allowance for illness or voluntary absence. In the period with which we are dealing there were only from 230 to 240 working days in the year; that is to say, there were 60 or 70 more holidays than we now have. Probably shorter hours and more days of work would have been better for all concerned. The other compensation was the very high rate of wages. To state the printer’s wages of that time in terms of money would carry very little information, partly because of the difference in coinage and partly because of the difference in the purchasing power of money. The really enlightening fact is that the wages of a printer were from two to three times those of journeymen in the other skilled trades. Actual wages were fixed by the operation of the law of supply and demand and by the skill of the individual workman. There was what we should call today a “scale” fixed either by custom or by law. The scale, however, instead of being a minimum, as now, was a maximum, the variations being below instead of above it. Unfortunately there was a great deal of unemployment, owing to the prevalence of a form of work which will be presently described. This unemployment was not only a serious evil in itself, but it led to competition among workmen, who were often willing to work for less than the going rate rather than to go idle. Another tendency toward the lowering of wages was the competition in the book trade caused by literary piracy and the work of printers from the smaller towns or even outside countries who could do work cheaper than it could be done in the larger cities. For example, in the absence of copyright a printer might go to the expense of getting out an edition of an important work only to have a rival buy one of his copies and throw into the market an edition at a price based on the cost of manufacture only, while it is obvious that even if the competition were based on the cost of manufacture the printer from Lyons could undersell the printer from Paris because his presses turned out 700 more sheets a day, an advantage of 25 per cent. All this competition had a tendency to reduce selling prices and to drive down the workman’s pay. It was for these reasons that the employers were so anxious to use laborers instead of journeymen, and apprentices instead of either. All these depressing tendencies had full sway under the curiously inverted scale system which made the scale a maximum instead of a minimum.