The Guild thus constituted, outlived the Government that had created it and many succeeding governments. It even survived the Republic and the period of revolutions and of Napoleonic invasions; and came to a close only with the first decade of the present century, after an existence of more than two hundred and fifty years. The Stationers’ Company of London still exists under that name, but its control over the printing and publishing trades of England disappeared many years before the dissolution of the Guild of Venice. The Guild appears to have moved but slowly in the work of controlling the printing and the book-trade of the city; it was not until 1571 that it issued a decree (which apparently had the force of a decree of the Council) forbidding anyone not a member of the Guild from setting up a printing-press or opening a book-store. It was also forbidden for anyone to exercise any of the functions of a printer or a bookseller unless he had served a five years’ apprenticeship in Venice. Foreigners who desired to exercise the art of printing, or to carry on the business of bookselling, must first serve five years in some shop in Venice, and after examination and approval by the authorities of the Guild, must pay ten ducats for matriculation. The penalty for infringement of the above decree was fifty ducats. A protest was made to the _Proveditore di Comun_ concerning the authority of the Guild to make or to enforce any such regulation, but the _Proveditore_ promptly confirmed the action of the Guild, and in so doing confirmed its authority to control the business of printing and book-selling. This control seems, however, during no period to have been complete. Up to the year 1600, the Guild had at no time contained more than seventy-five members. In 1596, according to the reports of the _Rifformatori_, there were one hundred and twenty presses at work in Venice, and it was necessary to print one hundred and fifty copies of the _Concordat_ of 1596, in order to distribute them among the booksellers of the city. It is probable, therefore, that the master-printers and book-sellers must together have exceeded seventy-five, and in that case the Guild could not have included them all. While the Guild claimed, as we have seen, full jurisdiction over the printers and booksellers, and claimed also the right to forbid any person to carry on these trades without having obtained a certificate of competence from its own examiners, it is probable that it lacked the power to enforce its authority or to carry into effect its decrees.