and newspapers, in all the [parliamentary] chambers and public discussions? To the same degree by which the laboring class is increasing its wage and improving its situation, the small class of craftsmen has been declining from year to year. But how could it even be otherwise? The craftsman is banished to a restricted sphere of activity by the pernicious compulsion to practice just one craft. Outdated laws compel him to squander his best years of study and youthful aspirations on the never-ending, spirit-killing monotony of the same tasks, or be tormented by sweeping alleyways, cleaning rooms, watching the children, with odd jobs, etc., instead of granting him open study contracts, the length of such apprenticeships being solely measured according to the individual talents of the apprentice himself. When craftsmen, after exerting themselves and spending their small savings, then become masters, their acquired learning is probably of no use to them at all; the very occupational trade in which they have become stuck is overcrowded, or else machines have displaced handicrafts; other needs, other circumstances have turned the business branch in question into one that no longer pays — but look, the regulations on occupational trades impede the transition to more lucrative kinds of employment! Thus, it comes about that thousands of German craftsmen live in a garret, with the independence they dreamed of, but their lot is far worse than that of the workers who are employed in a workshop or a factory for a steady or piece wage. Circumstances have changed, those run-down craftsmen have become proletarians, they often have to enter into service to their fellow master craftsmen for less than journeymen’s wages, beg for a piece of work or lie longingly in wait, hour upon hour, for customers they have lost to the factory system, the railways, freedom of commerce, etc.— Truly, this condition is unbearable over the long run, but it is unavoidable; for the compulsion to practice just one trade must create a proletariat among the craftsmen themselves, and only occupational freedom can turn proletarians into industrious and contented citizens!
[ . . . ]
IV. What does occupational freedom accomplish from a moral point of view?
There are hardly enough names for all the harm that occupational freedom has supposedly brought to the world, and so “demoralization” has also been named as one of the dark sides of this holy human right of freedom to work. Regarding this point, the central arguments raised on behalf of the 1850 proposal for a Law on the Trades in Bremen read as follows: “The advantages of the guild system relate to how, from an ethical point of view, nothing is better at counteracting demoralization than that spirit that develops, of its own accord, in a tightly integrated class of working people secure in their employment; [ . . . ] to how, from a political point of view, the state can rely on these people as strong; and [to how] if, by contrast, occupational freedom for the trades prevails, then everyone is left on his own, the moral posture that the corporate spirit provides goes missing, etc."
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