The guilds of "great" commerce and of "great" industry also had their fine sense of honour, their complicated regulations, their exclusive spirit. But what distinguished them was the fact that their capital was large and that they dealt with a vast market; consequently, while the former were busy with exchange and transport, traversed land and sea with their convoys, and constituted themselves the carriers and brokers of the world, the latter intensified production; they possessed workshops which for those days were very large, and, in order to lower their general expenses, were interested in new inventions, and willingly adopted mechanical methods; at Florence, for example, metallic carders, which were still prohibited in Great Britain in 1765, were already in use under the guild system. Banking, commercial and maritime law, the science of finance, the art of production on a large scale and of securing international relations certainly owe a great deal to these merchants and manufacturers, who were the precursors of modern capitalists. The members of these powerful guilds amassed enormous fortunes, built themselves superb palaces, became counsellors and money-lenders to kings, towns, or popes. Sometimes they were too adventurous in their speculations and their bankruptcies made a wide stir. Accustomed to affairs of the highest importance and to court intrigues, they became diplomats, clever politicians, who willingly took their share in government; nor was it by chance that the first man in France who tried to reform the kingdom according to the views of the Third Estate was Étienne Marcel, provost of the richest Parisian guild. Often, however, these great burgesses were of an aristocratic spirit. In the city they opposed the rise of the lower classes, and, in their magnificent palaces, princes in fact before they were princes in name, as the Medicis became, they gradually extinguished around them the love of liberty and of republican virtues. At the same time they broke up that solidarity which was the very soul of the primitive guilds; they created a social system which perpetuated riches above and poverty below; they enslaved and cruelly exploited the clerks and workers they employed, their attitude towards whom was no longer that of masters towards journeymen or _compagnons_, but that of lords towards dependents. In a word, they broke from the conditions which no longer sufficed for the realization of their ambitions, and they were preparing, indeed they were already developing, an organization of labour which anticipated the future. They were the agents of that profound change which slowly brought about the death of the guilds. CHAPTER VI EXTERNAL CAUSES OF DECAY