In France, which, as a commercial and manufacturing country, was considerably behind the advance of England, it was a common practice, in many villages and small towns, not very long ago, for the weavers to make the looms and other implements of their trade. In the fifteenth century, in the same country, before an apprentice could be admitted to the privilege of a master-weaver, it was not only necessary for him to prove that he understood his trade as a weaver, but that he was able to construct all the machines and tools with which he carried on his craft. Those who know anything of the business of weaving will very readily come to the conclusion that the apprentice of the fifteenth century, whose skill was put to such a proof, was both an indifferent weaver and an indifferent mechanician;--that in the attempt to unite two such opposite trades, he must have excelled in neither;--and that in fact the regulation was one of those monstrous violations of the freedom of industry, which our ancestors chose to devise for the support of industry. Carrying the principle of a division of labour to the other extreme point, we have seen that a vast number of persons are engaged in the manufacture of a piece of cloth,[29] who, if individually set to carry the workmanship of that piece of cloth through all its stages, would be utterly incompetent to produce it at all, much less to produce it as durable and beautiful as the cloth which we all daily consume. How would the sorter of the wool, for example, know how to perform the business of the scourer, or of the dyer, or of the carder? or the carder that of the spinner or the weaver? or the weaver that of the miller, or boiler, or dyer, or brusher, or cutter, or presser? We must be quite sure that, if any arbitrary power or regulation, such as compelled the weaver of the fifteenth century to make his own loom, were, on the other hand, to compel a man engaged in any one branch of the manufacture of woollen cloth to carry that manufacture through all its stages, the production of cloth would be utterly suspended; and that the workmen being incompetent to go on, the wages of the workmen could no longer be paid;--for the wages of labour are paid by the consumer of the produce of labour, and here there would be nothing to consume.