intended for the softness of ploughed land, are
needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the
local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes,
and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his
blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to
which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright
learns from the carter--that ignorant fellow--the answer to
the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for
his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A
part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair
load for his horse in the district where he is working. So
many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or
wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or
straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to
their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse
can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are
bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts
(as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are
put before a cart and load which the London carter would
deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.

So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an industry
but produces its own special knowledge relating to
unclassified details of adjustment.[76]

It is this craft-knowledge and common professional feeling which is at
the basis of all associations of workpeople, from the semi-religious
societies of ancient times, which met in secret to worship their
patron-god--Hephaestos, the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the
god of the doctors--through the great guilds of the Middle Ages to the
trade unions and professional organizations of to-day. Trade unions do
not exist simply to raise wages or to fight the capitalist, any more
than the British Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to
bargain with the Government. They exist to serve a professional need: to
unite men who are doing the same work and to promote the welfare and
dignity of that work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems
of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of new and
unfamiliar processes. Professional associations are, and are bound to
be, conservative: their conservatism is honourable and to their credit:
for they are the transmitters of a great tradition. The pr