[21] Dr. Brentano’s essay was originally prefixed to Toulmin Smith’s _English Gilds_, published by the Early English Text Society in 1870. It was republished separately as _The History and Development of Gilds and the Origin of Trades Unions_ (135 pp., 1870), and it is to this edition that we refer. Dr. Brentano’s larger work, _Die Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart_ (Leipzig, 2 vols., 1871-72), includes this essay, and also his article in the _North British Review_ for October 1870 on “The Growth of a Trades Union.” It is only fair to say that in this, the ablest study of English Trade Union history down to that time, Dr. Brentano lent no support to the popular idea of any actual descent of the Trade Unions from the gilds. The _Cobden Club Essays_ (1872) contain a good article on Trade Unions, by Joseph Gostick, in which it is argued that these associations were, in England, unknown before the eighteenth century, and had no connection with the gilds. [22] Page 102. [23] The first hundred pages of George Howell’s _Conflicts of Capital and Labour_ (first edition, 1877; second edition, 1890) are a close paraphrase of Dr. Brentano’s essay, practically the whole of which appears, often in the same words, as Howell’s own. But already in 1871 Dr. Brentano, in his _Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart_ (vol. i. ch. iii. p. 83), expressly connected the Trade Unions, like Schanz, not with the gilds, but with the Journeymen Fraternities, which he suggests may have “awaked under changed circumstances to new strength and life, and to a new policy.” We gather that Sir William Ashley inclines to this view. “My own impression,” he says, “is that we shall by and by find that, like the usages of the German journeymen in the eighteenth century that centred into Herbergen, the trade clubs of eighteenth century England were broken-down survivals from an earlier period, undergoing, with the advent of the married journeyman and other causes, the slow transformation from which they emerged in the nineteenth century as the nuclei of the modern Trade Union.” Sir William Ashley does not assert that any continuity of organisation can be proved. “What is suggested is only that the habit of acting together in certain ways, which we find to characterise the journeymen of the eighteenth century, had been formed in a much earlier period” (_Surveys: Historic and Economic_, by Sir William Ashley, 1900). [24] So long as the Companies continued to exercise any jurisdiction over their trades, we find them (as in the cases of the London Framework-knitters and the Dublin Silkweavers) supported by any workmen’s combinations that existed. In exceptional instances, such as the London Brushmakers, Basketmakers, and Watermen, we find this alliance for the exclusion of “illegal men” continuing into the nineteenth century, and (as regards the Watermen) down to the present time.