It will easily be understood how troubled must have been the life of associations formed of such diverse elements. There was in each an endless succession of internal struggles in the attempt to maintain between the varying elements an equilibrium which was necessarily unstable. Each "member," according to the number of its adherents, or according to the social standing which it claimed, or which was accorded to it by public opinion, fought for the mastery; but as in the course of years their relative importance was constantly modified, the constitution of the whole body was for ever changing. No fixed principle regulated its ceaseless mobility, or set on a solid basis the organization of its compact but rival groups, of which one or another was ever tempted to imagine itself sacrificed. 3. The guild, when simple, was usually half democratic. Being a bourgeois growth developing in feudal surroundings, it rested, like the feudal system itself, on two closely connected principles--hierarchy and equality. It included several superposed grades, while at the same time it assured identical rights to everybody included in any one of those grades. Masters, journeymen, and apprentices were ranked one above another, but those of the same grade were equals. Inequality could be, theoretically at least, only temporary, since the master had once been a journeyman, the journeyman was a prospective master, and the apprentice in his turn would climb to the top of the ladder. This state of things, however, was only to be met with in the building trades, in "small" industry and "small" commerce--the most numerous it is true, but not the most powerful. There alone was almost realized the idyllic picture of the workman working in the workshop beside his master, sharing his life, eating at his table, his partner in joys and sorrows, joining him in processions and at public ceremonies, until the day when he himself should rise to be a master.