[168] Everyone knows what an immense progress has been realised since by the motors used in motor cars and aeroplanes, and what is achieved now by the transmission of electrical power. But I leave these lines as they were written, as a testimony of the way in which the conquest of air began, and of the part taken in it by the French small industry. CHAPTER VII. SMALL INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES (_continued_). _Petty trades in Germany_: Discussions upon the subject and conclusions arrived at--Results of the census taken in 1882, 1895, and 1907--_Petty trades in Russia_--Conclusions. _Petty Trades in Germany._ The various industries which still have retained in Germany the characters of petty and domestic trades have been the subject of many exhaustive explorations, especially by A. M. Thun and Prof. Issaieff, on behalf of the Russian Petty Trades Commission, Emanuel Hans Sax, Paul Voigt, and very many others. By this time the subject has a bulky literature, and such impressive and suggestive pictures have been drawn from life for different regions and trades that I felt tempted to sum up these life-true descriptions. However, as in such a summary I should have to repeat much of what has already been said and illustrated in the preceding chapter, it will probably more interest the general reader to know something about the conclusions which can be drawn from the works of the German investigators,[169] and to know the conclusions that may be drawn from the three censuses of industries which have been made in Germany in the years 1882, 1895, and 1907. This is what I am going to do. Unhappily, the discussion upon this important subject has often taken in Germany a passionate and even a personally aggressive character.[170] On the one hand the ultra-conservative elements of German politics tried, and succeeded to some extent, in making of the petty trades and the domestic industries an arm for securing a return to the “olden good times.” They even passed a law intended to prepare a re-introduction of the old-fashioned, closed and patriarchal corporations which could be placed under the close supervision and tutorship of the State, and they saw in such a law a weapon against social democracy. On the other hand, the social democrats, justly opposed to such measures, but themselves inclined, in their turn, to take too abstract a view of economical questions, bitterly attack all those who do not merely repeat the stereotyped phrases to the effect that “the petty trades are in decay,” and “the sooner they disappear the better,” as they will give room to capitalist centralisation, which, according to the social democratic creed, “will soon achieve its own ruin.” In this dislike of the small industries they are, of course, at one with the economists of the orthodox school, whom they combat on nearly all other points.[171]