A fairly careful study of the conditions of this period shows that according to our modern ideas the journeymen generally appear to better advantage than the masters. There is no question, of course, that there were unreasonable demands and that individual journeymen or even groups of journeymen behaved at times in objectionable ways. On the whole, however, the effort of the journeymen of this period seems to have been only to obtain fair treatment and a reasonable recognition of their rights. They especially desired to be treated as men and to confer on equal terms with their employers instead of being treated as inferior beings bound to accept without protest what was handed down to them. It must be remembered that they were far more highly educated than the workers in any other industry and that they had been officially recognized many times as being in a class apart from the ordinary workmen. They appear to have attempted only to secure in the industry the same recognition which they legally enjoyed socially. While they did attempt to have a voice in the fixing of wages and hours there is very little evidence of any attempt to enforce upon the shops the observance of rules and regulations made by themselves. The masters on the other hand had those ancient ideas of authority which have already been mentioned. They were not willing that their employees should rise above the level of other workers and they were not willing to recognize them as men entitled to fair consideration, to say nothing of equal rights. They lived in the days of serfdom and they took their position as masters quite seriously and quite literally. This opposition in spirit between the masters who, by their wealth, their education, and their social position were associated with the upper classes and imbued with all of their ancient pride, and the men who, themselves educated and imbued with a spirit of progress and a desire for freedom, were attempting to rise above the condition of serfdom in which the laborers of that age were commonly held was the real root of the struggles in the medieval printing trade. The purely industrial questions involved were the occasions rather than the causes of strife.