attached to one of the large agricultural estates, either as baker, smith, miller, or tiller of the soil. These serfs, as they were called, were granted a small strip of land to cultivate, for which they paid a rental in the form of labor and a certain percentage of all their farm products. If the title to the land changed from one lord to another, the serfs stayed on their land. They could not of their own will leave the estate to which they belonged, nor could the lord deprive them of their holdings. This system allowed each manor to be an independent unit, needing little outside help.

With the rise of skill in industries men began to leave the countryside, or to buy their freedom from serfdom, and to go to the tiny towns or "vills." There they plied their special trades, such as the weaving of cloth, first for barter and then, in time, for money. These industrial villages were soon playing a large part in the commerce and the skilled trades of the world. In order to protect their trade secrets and to prevent outside competition, the workers in these various trades or crafts organized themselves into trade organizations called guilds. Each guild jealously guarded its trade secrets and, as its wealth increased, grew more powerful. Yet the actual work was still done in the homes of the guild members; the guild simply provided a method of preventing outsiders from encroaching on its trade.

As the wants of agricultural peoples extended, there came to be an increasing demand for manufactured goods. These goods during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in English-speaking countries were made in the homes, in the way shown above. In most homes some manufacturing was done. Young people were bound out to the masters in these home occupations to learn a trade as apprentices. These apprentices in time came to be their own masters, and were known as master-journeymen; and they, in turn, taught their apprentices. This system was called the domestic system of manufacture. The capital needed was small and was furnished by the master-journeyman.

With the invention of steam and modern machinery, in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century, the domestic system of manufacture gave way to the factory system.

Under this new system the worker no longer worked in his own home, but left it to work in the building where the machinery was installed. Usually he did not even own this machinery, as in previous days he had owned his loom or his mill. He worked instead for the man who did own it. In order to increase the output of his factory, the factory owner soon

THE OLD-FASHIONED SHOEMAKER
Slow hand methods made shoes very expensive.

found it was best to hire a different man for each kind of work to be done, letting each wage earner repeat and repeat the process until he could do it at a maximum rate of speed. In other words, the laborer no longer made an entire shoe; he operated only the machine that cut the leather, or that nailed on the heel, or that put on the tip. The number of homes in which manufacturing could profitably be employed decreased, until practically all the manufacturing was done in factories, and the domestic system ceased to be.

The Twentieth Century Family. Thus family life of

today arose as a result of the change to the new method of earning a living. The eighteenth century family was largely a self-sufficient family. The twentieth century family is largely an income-earning, buying family, dependent for its continuance upon the economic activities of hundreds of thousands of other families. The eighteenth century family was not concerned so much with producing goods to sell as with supplying its own needs. It could support itself. It had little to sell and it bought little in

Ingenious machines do most of the work and make it possible to produce fine shoes at reasonable prices. Contrast this with the picture on page 177.

return. The twentieth century family must always earn, because it is under the constant necessity of buying. The prime requirement for the survival of the old family was home production; the prime necessity of the present-day family is a steady wage from factory production.

Today each of us is dependent upon the production of others. A strike by coal miners brings suffering to families everywhere. This suffering comes not only because homes cannot be heated in winter; but because factories must close down for want of fuel, and their wage earners thus lose

their chance to earn a living; and also because stores and factories that have goods for the coal miners can not sell to men who are earning no wages. When the owners of a railroad "lock out" their employees, farmers suffer for

This map shows some of the steamships with their cargoes and ports of origin which entered New York harbor in one week.

want of markets and people everywhere are in distress for want of supplies.

The Industrial World Today. People are no longer content with the things their own community supplies. They draw on the entire world for their needs and pleasures.

may have for breakfast an orange from California;

CHAPTER VIII

MAKING A LIVING

"No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him; there is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will, and blessed are the horny hands of toil."

-Lowell

A Loaf of Bread. Out in Montana a farmer is planting wheat. The ground has been plowed by a large tractor made in a factory employing thousands of workers, in South Bend, Indiana. The wheat seed the farmer uses is the kind

ln

recommended by the Montana Agricultural College. due season the wheat ripens. Some of the men who help to harvest it come from the East, through state, national, or private employment bureaus. The making of the reaper that harvests the wheat, the thresher that separates the

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