Going over now to what is known about the small industries of this country from direct observation, we find that the suburbs of London, Glasgow, and other great cities swarm with small workshops, and that there are regions where the petty trades are as developed as they are in Switzerland or in Germany. Sheffield is a well-known example in point. The Sheffield cutlery--one of the glories of England--is _not_ made by machinery: it is chiefly made by hand. There are at Sheffield a number of firms which manufacture cutlery right through from the making of steel to the finishing of tools, and employ wage-workers; and yet even these firms--I am told by Edward Carpenter, who kindly collected for me information about the Sheffield trade--let out some part of their work to the “small masters.” But by far the greatest number of the cutlers work in their homes with their relatives, or in small workshops supplied with wheel-power, which they rent for a few shillings a week. Immense yards are covered with buildings, which are subdivided into numbers of small workshops. Some of these cover but a few square yards, and there I saw smiths hammering, all the day long, blades of knives on a small anvil, close by the blaze of their fires; occasionally the smith may have one helper, or two. In the upper storeys scores of small workshops are supplied with wheel-power, and in each of them, three, four, or five workers and a “master” fabricate, with the occasional aid of a few plain machines, every description of tools: files, saws, blades of knives, razors, and so on. Grinding and glazing are done in other small workshops, and even steel is cast in a small foundry, the working staff of which consists only of five or six men. When I walked through these workshops I easily imagined myself in a Russian cutlery village, like Pavlovo or Vorsma. The Sheffield cutlery has thus maintained its olden organisation, and the fact is the more remarkable as the earnings of the cutlers are low as a rule; but, even when they are reduced to a few shillings a week, the cutler prefers to vegetate on his small earnings than to enter as a waged labourer in a “house.” The spirit of the old trade organisations, which were so much spoken of in the ’sixties of the nineteenth century, is thus still alive.