Friend Gottfried who is himself a political hawker desires to abolish the "travelling tradesman or hawker" in other, profane wares on the grounds of the dishonesty of such work. (p. 60.)"A manufacturer of craft goods desires to withdraw his assets from the business to his own advantage and, dishonestly, to the disadvantage of his creditors. Like all ambivalent things this phenomenon too is described by a foreign word: it is called bankruptcy. He then quickly takes his finished products to a neighbouring town and sells them there to the highest bidder"(p. 64). These auctions -- "in actual fact like a sort of garbage that our dear neighbour, Commerce, disposes of in the garden of Handicraft"-- must be abolished. (Would it not be much simpler, Friend Gottfried, to go to the root of the matter and abolish bankruptcy itself?).
"Of course, the annual fairs are in a special position" (p. 65).
"The law will have to be flexible so as to allow the various places to call an assembly of all the citizens to decide by majority vote (!) whether permanent annual fairs should be retained or abolished" (p. 68).
Gottfried now comes to the "vexed" question of the relationship between manufacture and machine industry and produces the following:
"Let everyone sell only those goods that he himself produces with his own hands." (p. 80.) "Because machines and manufacture have gone their own ways they have strayed from their true paths and now both are in a sorry plight." (p. 84).
He wishes to unite them by getting artisans such as the bookbinders, to band together and maintain a machine.
"As they only use the machine for themselves and when it is required they will be able to produce more cheaply than the factory owner" (p. 85).
"Capital will be broken by association" (p. 84). (And associations will be broken by capital.)He then generalises his ideas about the "purchase of a machine to rule lines, and to cut paper and cardboard" (p. 85) for the united certificated bookbinders of Bonn and conceives the notion of a "Machine-Chamber".
"Confederations of the various guild masters must set up businesses everywhere, similar to the factories of individual businessmen though on a smaller scale. These will work to order, exclusively for the benefit of local masters. They will not accept commissions from other employers"(p. 86).
What distinguishes these Machine Chambers is the fact that "a commercial management" will only "be needed initially" (ibid). "Every idea as novel as this one", Gottfried exclaims "ecstatically", "can only be put into practice when all the details have been thought out in the most sober, matter of fact way". He urges "each and every branch of manufacture to perform this analysis for itself"! (pp. 87, 88).
There follows a polemic against competition from the state in the shape of the labour performed by the inmates of prisons, reminiscences about a colony of criminals ("The creation of a human Siberia" (p. 102)), and finally an attack on the "so-called handicraft companies and handicraft commissions" in the armed forces. The aim here is to ease the burdens imposed by the army on the artisan classes by inducing the state to commission goods from the guild masters that it could itself produce more cheaply.
"This deals satisfactorily with the problems of competition" (p. 109).
Gottfried's second important point touches on the material aid due to the manufacturing classes from the state. Gottfried regards the state solely from the point of view of an official and hence arrives at the opinion that the easiest and surest way to help the artisan is by direct subsidy from the Treasury to erect trade halls and set up loan-funds. How the funds reach the Treasury in the first place is the "ugly" side of the problem and naturally enough, cannot be investigated here.
Lastly, our theologian inevitably lapses into the role of moral preacher. He reads the artisan class a moral lecture on self-help. He firstly condemns the "complaints about long-term borrowing and about discounts"(p. 136), and invites the artisan to inspect his own conscience: "Do you always fix the same, unchanging price, my friend, for every job of work that you undertake?" (p. 132). On this occasion he also warns the artisan against making extortionate demands on "wealthy Englishmen". "The whole root of the evil", according to the fantasies that inhabit Gottfried's mind, "is the system of annual accounts" (p. 139). This is followed by Jeremiads about the way in which the artisans carry on in the taverns and their wives indulge their love of finery (p. 140 ff.).
The means by which the artisan class is to better itself are "the corporation, the sickness fund and the artisans' court" (p. 146); and lastly, the workers' educational clubs (p. 153). Here is his closing statement about these educational clubs.
