=243. The new employers aided by the immigration of foreign laborers.=—Success in manufacture still depended largely on the quality of labor, and one great advantage which England owed to her political and religious freedom was the immigration of skilled laborers seeking refuge from the persecutions of the Continent. Refugees, of whom the Huguenots from France were the most important, brought with them improvements in the woolen manufacture and stimulated the development of other industries: silk, linen, cotton, calico, paper, etc. It is, however, hard to see how the labor of these people could have had a great effect in extending foreign trade if they had not been guided by their employers, who were men of considerable capital, with broad views and wide acquaintance, willing to take large contracts and eager to extend the market for their goods. An English pamphlet of the period says that the towns in which the silk and cotton manufactures developed owed their industries “to the public spirit of two or three men in each.” The development of this process, by which artisans lost their former independence and came to work for an employer, can be seen from a statement of the economist Adam Smith, who wrote in 1776. “In every part of Europe,” he said, “twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent.” This was not yet true of “every part” of Europe, and even in the western states of the Continent the process had not advanced so far as in England, where the author had made most of his observations. =244. Dependence of technical progress on the new class of employers.=—It is noteworthy that the great inventions to which the modern development of manufactures has often been ascribed could not have been made of practical importance unless this system of organization had developed previously. The gilds were bitterly opposed to any changes in their system of routine, and independent artisans would not find it worth their while to introduce costly improvements. Many inventions had been made before the eighteenth century which would have been of the greatest importance in manufacture if there had been any one to take them up and put them through; they fell dead, however, on the world of their time, or were killed by the opposition of petty producers. An illustration of the way in which premature inventions disappeared can be given from the experience of a man who, to all appearances, had devised a repeating firearm before the end of the sixteenth century. A German recommended to an English statesman “one of his countrymen, who had invented a harquebuse, that shall containe ten balls or pelletes of lead, all the which shall goe off, one after another, having once given fire, so that with one harquebuse one may kill ten theeves or other enemies without recharging.” The importance of such an invention needs only to be suggested, but, so far as the writer knows, nothing further was heard of it.