by the
middle class, whose production the guilds everywhere restricted; but
also without result. Indeed thirteen years before the Revolution, in
1776, a minister of the Reformed party in France, the famous Turgot,
abolished the guilds, but the privileged world of medieval feudalism
considered itself, and with perfect justice, in mortal danger if its
vital principle of privilege did not extend to all classes of society;
and so, six months after the abolition of the guilds, the king was
empowered to revoke this edict and to reestablish the guilds. Nothing
but the Revolution could overthrow (and it did overthrow in one day,
by the capture of the Bastille) that which in Germany had been vainly
assailed since 1672 and in France since 1614--for almost two
centuries--by legal means.

You see from this, Gentlemen, that however great the advantages of
reformation by legal means are, such means have nevertheless in all
the more important points one great disadvantage--that of being
absolutely powerless for whole centuries; and, furthermore, that the
revolutionary means, undeniable as its disadvantages are, has as a
compensation the advantage of attaining quickly and effectively a
practical result.

If you will now keep in mind that the guilds were connected in an
inseparable manner with the whole social arrangement of the Middle
Ages, you will see at once how the first machine, Arkwright's
spinning-jenny, embodied a complete revolution in those social
conditions.

For how could machine production be possible under the guild system,
in which the number of journeymen and apprentices a master workman
could employ was determined by law in each locality; or how, under
the guild system, in which the different trades were distinguished by
law from one another in the most exact manner, and each master could
carry on only one of them--so that, for instance, the tailors and the
nail-makers of Paris for centuries had lawsuits with the menders of
clothes and the locksmiths, in order to draw lines between their
respective trades--how, under such a guild system, could production be
possible with a system of machines which requires the union of the
most varied departments of work under the control of one and the same
management?

It had come to the point, then, that production itself had called into
being, by its constant and gradual development, instruments of
production which must necessarily destroy the existing condition of
things--