The ground thus cleared, the masters could use the Companies entirely for their own profit and advantage. They endeavoured more and more to restrict the number of members, and to make the handicrafts of London the monopoly of a few families; in this attempt they were only too successful; in the sixteenth century Bacon calls the City Companies “fraternities of evil.” The masters made the apprentices swear that they would not carry on trade on their own account without the masters’ consent. The weakness of the law is shown in the failure of Henry’s law (1537); fixing the entrance fee of an apprentice at 2s. 6d., it rose to 40s., to £10; in the time of James the First to £20, £60, and £100; and in 1720 to £500 and more. As to the further degeneration and the final ruin of the Craft Guilds, I refer again to Luigo Brentano.[16] “As the Craft-Gilds everywhere had sunk down to mere societies for the investment of capital, and as their dividends depended entirely on the exclusion of competition, it was unavoidable that the spirit of gain should lead them to restrictions which became always more oppressive for the public. The annoyances they caused were considerably increased by a process which, after the sixteenth century, was of frequent occurrence in all countries; those Craft-Gilds namely, which had hitherto comprised kindred crafts, split up into several, according to the individual trades. These then watched each other with the utmost jealousy in order to prevent encroachments on their mutual rights, and continually fought each other in endless lawsuits. Thus, for instance, the Fletchers and Bowyers in London separated themselves into two corporations in the reign of Elizabeth. One might wonder that, on the one hand, the workmen, whose position was so much deteriorated by the degeneration of the Craft-Gilds, did not at once overthrow their dominion, as the Craft-Gilds had formerly superseded the degenerated Gilds of the patricians, and that, on the other hand, the State did not, in the interest of the public, take any steps towards the abolition of the Gilds, which had already been desired so often. But as to the working-men, though their position, and especially their prospects, had been greatly deteriorated by this degeneration of the Craft-Gilds, their interest was rather a reformation, than the abolition, of those bodies. The Craft-Gilds maintained a number of regulations, which protected the working-men, and in consequence of which their material position appears comfortable and free from cares, if compared with that of the factory hands at the beginning of this century, when these regulations no longer existed. Uprisings of working-men are therefore to be found in those days only in consequence of infringements of Gild-regulations. But as for a reformation of the Craft-Gilds according to the interests of the working-men, the latter were not powerful enough to carry it out against their masters. These still