208 THE SOCIAL COMPONENTS

as tenants or as peasant owners on lands that had not previously been in-
corporated within the feudal manors. As the towns grew and agricul-
tural production was directed more and more toward production for sale
in the markets, the manorial proprietors with their hand hoes and pointed
sticks simply could not compete economically with the progressive in-
dependent farmers who used horses and plows. Today the Southern
tenant cotton farmer with his mule and plow cannot compete, in spite
of every conceivable form of governmental pampering, with the Texas
and California farmers who use tractors and gang plows.

The guild system of work organization developed, as has been shown,
to facilitate the application of improved craft techniques. Soon, however,
that system became so highly institutionalized that it served as a check
to further technological changes. When at length such changes never-
theless occurred, the guilds resisted with every device at their command.
Since the guilds had become well entrenched and had for long had such
other forms of organization as the Church and the state on their side,
application of machine techniques was long delayed. When the medieval
guild ultimately dissolved, it was replaced by other forms of work or-
ganization that in turn set up resistance to still newer techniques. The
steamship, for example, was bitterly resented and was frequently sabo-
taged by sailors who had grown up in sail and who much preferred the
hardships and hazards of life in a windjammer to the smell of burning
coal and hot oil. The railroad likewise had to win its way against the
taunts, the resentment, and the active resistance of the bargemen and
wagon freighters with whom it competed. And rare was the sailor who
was able and willing to make the shift from sail to steam or the bargeman
or freighter who could and would become a worker on the railroad.

More recently, the rise of labor unions as an organizational adaptation
to the factory system of production provided an agency by which the
worker could make his resentment toward technological changes explicit
and effective. The unions became an important factor in the economic
life of England shortly after 1850 and somewhat later on the Continent
and in America. They were usually "craft" in type; tinsmiths, carpenters,
bricklayers, coal miners, teamsters, etc., each formed their own union.
These unions endeavored to fix the conditions of labor, to maintain
standards of workmanship, and to obtain a monopoly over the craft
activity. In this they were but repeating in a new form and on a larger
scale the control techniques of the old guilds. (The medieval guild was,
in fact, their model.) Union regulations, established in terms of the tech-
niques of the late nineteenth century, soon became static and made the
introduction of new techniques difficult and at times impossible.

Union resistance to technological innovations has continued down to
the present time. Recently, for example, the application of the airbrush