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London, was also on the horizon and was to make books accessible to a much wider public. Bräker would have rejoiced at that!

As when dealing with the first half of the century, it is difficult to gauge how prosperous the Swiss were at this time. Helen Maria Williams [v 1 pp 70-71] says that the peasants had done well out of the Revolution and were better fed than those of France. Efforts had certainly been made towards progress in agriculture from the medieval three-field system which had been in use down to the beginning of the 18th century. Common land, which had been used for pasture, was brought under cultivation to feed both people and their livestock, which increased the food supply but weakened the bonds of peasant communities where common enterprises declined and individual enterprise replaced it. Hirzel's "Philosophical farmer" had helped to popularise a "back to the land" movement and gain recognition for the value of the farmer and his work, but the "Agronomen", agricultural reformers, were less successful in reducing the burden of taxes, or reforming the price regulations which disadvantaged the farmers in favour of townspeople. Nor could they reduce the need to import grain, though they encouraged farmers to grow potatoes instead. Many farmers chose to continue with dairy farming, since this paid better.

Industrial workers, however, were not doing well. Simond, writing in 1823, paints a very dismal picture: reduced demand and export restrictions have produced "a nation of artificers starving altogether, helpless and hopeless" [p 100], and "crimes multiply with wants, the prisons are full and executions frequent" [p 94]. At the end of the 18th century the textile industry in Switzerland, already suffering from the effects of the introduction of machine-spun yarn from England, was further disadvantaged by the wars attendant on the French Revolution. The blockades and other restrictions of trade imposed at this time exacerbated a long-standing situation by which France, as Switzerland's most powerful neighbour and chief buyer of Swiss textile goods, could influence the lives of the workers in all branches of the Swiss textile industry. The industry survived, however, by increasing production in muslins and embroidery and other luxury articles where high standards of design and production were still in demand. There was still room for the skill of the individual worker to be recognised; the move from outwork to factory work had begun, but outwork took a long time to decline, in some areas it persisted into the twentieth century.

Industrial outwork was increasingly blamed for many social evils among the workers: physical unfitness, mental instability, sexual immorality and heavy drinking, also (as so often before), extravagance, particularly in clothes and jewellery. These complaints certainly had some foundation in fact: Bräker's long hours of work in a damp cellar, and his constant anxieties about money he owed and money owed to him, show that even a man of his strong constitution and optimistic temperament found it hard to endure the stresses of his cotton business. Working in a luxury trade also tended to increase the desire of the workers for higher quality in their own diet and clothing. Outwork broke down the family unit, encouraging each member to think only of how much they could make for themselves, so that children were not properly educated or even trained in ordinary farm and household work, and the increased financial independence of young people led them to lose respect for their elders. Clergy and parents deplored the tendency of higher wages to allow young people to marry earlier, celebrating "beggars' weddings", with "two spindles but no bed". Greed for money prompted the workers to cheat their employers (for example, by dampening yarn to make it heavier), but they in their turn had very little recourse if the employers would not pay a fair wage or supplied poor quality materials or equipment. Voellmy (v 2 p 130) quotes Michael Boesch, a pastor of Wildhaus in the Toggenburg, as writing in 1784 that the cotton industry would be a blessing if its profits were put to better use, but greed and vice had corrupted both employers and workers. All these tendencies had worsened during Bräker's lifetime, partly because of political instability, partly because the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment had destroyed most of the old certainties without producing anything to replace them.

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