an with direction,
with obedience to superiors on the part of the mass of men. Even in
the rudest tribes, the women and children were subject to the will of
the stronger, the head of the family. Among the Aryan races the family
system was widened, and the patriarch of the tribe secured personal
obedience and economic services from all members of the community.
Chattel slavery, the typical form of industrial organization in early
tropical civilization, seems to have been one of the necessary steps
to progress from rude conditions; students to-day incline to view it
as an essential stage in the history of the race. But as conditions
changed with industrial development, chattel slavery became an
inefficient form of industrial organization and a hindrance to
progress.

Sec. 2. #Workers in the Middle Ages#. Serfdom for rural labor and many
limitations on the workman's freedom in the towns were the prevailing
conditions in medieval Europe. Serfdom was both a political and an
economic relation. The self was bound to the soil; the lord could
command and control him; but the serf's obligations were pretty
well defined. He had to give services, but in return for them he got
something definite in the form of protection and the use of land.
Between the lord and the serf there continued an implied contract,
which passed by inheritance from father to son, in the case both of
the master and of the serf. In the towns conditions were better for
the free master class of the artisans who owned their tools and often
a little shop where they both made and sold their products. But the
mass of the workers, shut out from special privileges, bore a heavy
burden. There were strict rules of apprenticeship; gild regulations
forbidding the free choice of a trade or a residence; laws against
migration into the town; settlement laws making it impossible for
poor men to remove from one place to another; arbitrary regulation of
wages, either by the gilds in the towns or by national councils and
parliaments, forbidding the workmen to take the competitive wages
that economic conditions would have forced the employers to pay;
combination laws forbidding laborers to combine in their own interest.
These conditions prevailed even in the periods and in the countries
often referred to as particularly favorable for the working classes
(such as England in the fifteenth century).

Sec. 3. #Growth of the wage system#. Throughout the Middle Ages these
conditions