Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Though an ardent admirer himself of the great industries, Reybaud faithfully noted the striking superiority of well-being in the weavers’ cottages as compared with the misery of the factory hands in the cities.

Cottons, plain linen, and machine-made lace are now produced at such a low cost by machinery that hand-weaving evidently becomes an anachronism for the plainest descriptions of such goods.

It is evident that in most textile industries the power-loom supersedes the hand-loom, and the factory takes, or has taken already, the place of the cottage industry.

The most wonderful adaptations of the small industries to new requirements, and substantial technical progress in the methods of production, can be noted at the same time.

And wherever the village-community spirit is maintained, the small industries persist, while no effort is spared to bring the small plots under higher culture.

The small village jam-makers were the precursors and the rudiments of the great factories of preserves which now employ hundreds of workers.

The small bicycle workshops, with the hundreds of small improvements which they introduced, have been under our very eyes the primary cells out of which the great industry of the motor cars, and later on of the aeroplanes, has grown up.

We must not wonder, therefore, if we see so many small trades in this country; but we must regret that the great number have abandoned the villages in consequence of the bad conditions of land tenure, and that they have migrated in such…

The cheapness of cottons and woollens, of paper and brass, has created hundreds of new small industries.

Besides, the large factory stimulates the birth of new petty trades by creating new wants.

The countless small bicycle works which have lately grown up in this country, and are supplied with ready-made parts of the bicycle by the larger factories, are an instance in point.

New industries thus grow up to supplant the old ones; each of them passes through a preliminary stage on a small scale before reaching the great factory stage; and the more active the inventive genius of a nation is, the more it has of…

The petty trades are thus an important factor of industrial life even in Great Britain, although many of them have gathered into the towns.

And it must be said that the triumphs of the factory were too often achieved only by means of the most fraudulent adulteration and the underpaid labour of the children.

The Sheffield cutlery--one of the glories of England--is not made by machinery: it is chiefly made by hand.

The small industries are as much a distinctive feature of the British industry as its few immense factories and ironworks.

We thus see that even in this country, which may be considered as representing the highest development of the great industry, the number of persons employed in the small trade continues to be immense.

In the fabrication of food produce we find several great sugar, chocolate, and preserves works; but by their side we find also a very great number of small establishments, which seem not to complain of the proximity of the big ones, as…

In other words, in the manufacture of woollens, shoddy, hemp, hair, machine-made lace, and mechanical knitting, as also in the weaving of silks, there are, of course, large factories; but the majority of these establishments belong to the…

In every country of the world there are by the side of the large factories a great number of small ones, the success of which is due to the variety of their produce and the facilities they offer to follow the vagaries of fashion.

This could have been foreseen by everyone who has some practical knowledge of industry, but it is overlooked by the theorists, who know industry mostly from books.

The great industry is thus very far from having absorbed the small one.

Many of my readers will probably be astonished to learn that even in the cotton industry a great number of quite small factories continue to exist up to the present day.

The figures show, on the contrary, what an immense number of small factories and workshops resist the absorption by the big factories, and how they multiply by the side of the great industry in various branches, especially those of recent…

But it is especially in the division of the non-textile industries that we find an enormous development of small factories.