While the capitalistic organisation of industry increased the wealth of the masters, it condemned a large proportion of the craftsmen to remain permanently in the position of journeymen or wage-earners with the incidental result that women were excluded from their ranks in the more highly skilled trades. Under the old system of Family Industry, labour and capital had been united in one person or family group of persons, but capitalism brought them into conflict; and the competition which had previously only existed between rival families was introduced into the labour market, where men and women struggled with each other to secure work and wages from the capitalist. The keystone of the journeymen’s position in their conflict with capital, lay in their ability to restrict their own numbers by the enforcement of a long apprenticeship and the limitation of the number of apprentices. On gaining this point the journeymen in any trade secured a monopoly which enabled them to bargain advantageously with the masters. Their success raised them into the position of a privileged class in the world of labour, but did nothing to improve the position of the other wage-earners in unskilled or unorganised trades. When their organisation was strong enough the journeymen allowed no unapprenticed person to be employed upon any process of their trade, however simple or mechanical; a policy which resulted in the complete exclusion of women, owing to the fact that girls were seldom, if ever, apprenticed to these trades. It has been shown that under the old system, craftsmen had been free to employ their wives and daughters in any way that was convenient, the widow retaining her membership in her husband’s gild or company with full trading privileges, and the daughters able, if they wished, to obtain their freedom by patrimony. Journeymen however now worked on their masters’ premises, their traditions dating from a time when they were all unmarried men; and though the majority of them had renounced the expectation of rising above this position of dependence, the idea that they should extend their hardly won privileges to wife or daughter never occurred to them.