The Colchester Bay-makers introduced a new trade, so, perhaps, did the Kidderminster Carpet-weavers, but the movement at this time appears to be connected with the fact that industry was becoming specialised and localised. I am inclined to suspect that the companies of the seventeenth century differ from the craft gilds of the fifteenth, partly, at least, in this way, that whereas the former were the local organisations for regulating various trades in one town, the latter were the bodies, organised by royal authority for regulating each industry in that part of the country where it could be best pursued. It was at this date that the Sheffield Cutlers were incorporated, and indeed a large number of organisations in different towns. Several of the Coventry gilds, notably the Drapers and the Clothiers, were incorporated by royal charters during the seventeenth century, and if we turned to a northern town like Preston, we might be inclined to say that this was the real era when associations for industrial regulation flourished and abounded. [11] Fretton, "Memorials of Bakers' Gild," Mid-England, p. 124. [12] Sharp, "Pageants," 12. It is no part of my purpose to speak of the decay of these newly formed or newly resuscitated companies as it occurred in the eighteenth century. I have endeavoured to indicate the excellent aims which these institutions set before them, and the success which attended their efforts for a time. At the same time, it is a significant fact that they failed to maintain themselves as effective institutions in the sixteenth century, and when they were resuscitated they failed to maintain themselves as useful institutions in the eighteenth. Partly, as I believe, for good, and partly, as we here recognise, for evil, business habits have so changed that whatever is done for the old object--maintaining quality and skill--must be done in a new way. The power which we possess of directing and controlling the forces of nature has altered the position of the artisan, and made him a far less important factor in production. The maintenance of personal skill, the unlimited capacity for working certain materials, is no longer of such primary importance for industrial success as was formerly the case. There is another--perhaps a greater--difficulty in the diffusion of a wider and more cosmopolitan spirit; the sympathies of the old brethren for one another were strong, but they were intensely narrow. No town can be so isolated now, or kindle such intense local attachments as did the cities of the Middle Ages. There has been loss enough in the destruction of these gilds, but we cannot, by looking back upon them, reverse the past or re-create that which has been destroyed through the growth of the larger life we enjoy to-day. Let us rather remember them as showing what could be accomplished in the past, and as pointing towards something we ought to try to accomplish in some new fashion to-day.