=297. Restriction of manufactures by the gilds.=—German manufactures followed about the same course as that of the French which we have traced above. The gilds merited the term given them by an economist of the seventeenth century who said they were the “curse of Germany”; they seem to have been in some respects even more narrow than the French gilds. The same old evils reappear, but the reader must be asked to take these for granted and to direct his attention to some new aspects of the gild organization. Specially noteworthy are the obstacles put in the way of any man who desired to become a full member of a gild. Many gilds succeeded in making the exercise of the trade a family monopoly by the regulation that no man could become a master who did not marry the daughter or the widow of a master. One gild expelled a man because he had married a wife whose grandmother was alleged to have come from a shepherd’s family; other gilds expelled members because they had ridden an executioner’s horse or drunk with an executioner. A man had at best to pay very high fees to become a master, and this artificial restriction on the number of full members not only kept the ordinary workmen in a wretched position, but also raised the price of goods to the consumer. The monopoly of the gilds became more oppressive all the time. Most of their money, except the considerable part they spent in carousing, they used in lawsuits and in quarrels with rivals. For miles around a German town the gilds permitted no competitors, and they made it a regular part of their business to hunt down and exterminate independent producers. =298. The eighteenth century marked by general depression, with some signs of improvement.=—In Germany, in general, there was little improvement in conditions in the eighteenth century. The country was still intersected with tariff barriers. The Rhine was cut into four sharply defined parts, and the Elbe, by reason of tolls, had lost its trade in some wares of the first importance: steel, iron, copper, olive oil, wine, fish, etc. To the conflicts between cities there was still no end. The cities of southern Germany, weighted with taxes and surrounded by closed markets, declined still more in commercial importance. There were, however, some hopeful signs of progress. Two cities of the interior, Frankfort on the Main and Leipzig, were building up a business which rested not only on trade in wares but on dealings in bills of exchange, currency, commercial loans, etc. Beside the rise of these banking centers special importance attaches to the revival of commerce on the coast of the North Sea. Hamburg and Bremen seized the opportunity offered by the American Revolution and the European wars to which it gave rise to extend their trade as neutral carriers, and had soon passed their old rivals, the Dutch.