The finest and dearest qualities mentioned therein are spoken of as “several gross of English pencils”, for thus the better German manufactures had to disguise themselves under a foreign title. The demand for these manufactures was trifling and purely local, as the spirit of commerce and enterprise did but little to assist their introduction.
Nürnberg and Fürth appear to have been the first to patronise the products of the manufactory. To these places, as we know, the pencils finished in the course of the week were carried on Saturdays in a basket; but the fact of their having been well paid for goes to prove that even then their excellence was acknowledged. The relations at that time existing between the producer and the consuming public were however but little regulated. The producer stood by himself alone, cut off from the world, which seemed to him too immensely large for him to dare to step out into it. The farsighted vision, searching in every direction to discover new wants and invent new improvements, were wanting to him, as was also the beneficial influence of external relations, with which he was never brought in contact.
Nor was the consumer any more favorably situated.
The article became the object of extensive commercial speculation and had often to travel a very long way before it reached the hands of the consuming public, nor was the repute of a good name any guarantee to the consumer of the excellence of the article, for in order to keep the manufacturers in complete dependance, the merchants would not allow them to mark their better products with their names, but prescribed them foreign names and unmeaning signs, such as: Harps, Stars etc.
It was but slowly that the French process of mixing the lead with clay gained ground and many years after the adoption of this process the workmen, even in Faber’s manufactory, were still employed in working the Spanish lead in the old fashioned way by melting it and cutting it with a saw.
The progress of the French however soon forced the merchants to press the Nürnberg manufacturers to advance, so as not to be left behind by competition. After the introduction of the new composition the Nürnberg manufactories soon found themselves favorably circumstanced and yielded satisfactory profits both to the merchants and the manufacturers.
But this was not to last. In the first ten years of this century competition increased steadily and enormously so that demand by no means kept pace with supply, and the vital question forced itself upon the manufacturers, whether they were in a position to produce the article either better or cheaper?
This difficult problem was however solved in a manner unfavorable to the manufacture, and with that revolution commences the decay of the same which now began to make itself felt.
The manufacture had, as before observed, become dependant upon the trade of Nürnberg, which however no longer occupied its former high position, for, although a considerable trade with foreign lands still existed, it was to a great extent nominal. The enlargement and correction of ideas by foreign travel and personal acquaintance with the grand advancement in foreign industry, were wanting and thus no beneficial adjustment of the Nürnberg manufacture could be brought about. Manufacture became the shuttlecock of commercial speculation, which could not even so much as claim the credit of having successfully met the increased requirements of the age or put a stop to powerful competition or an overworked system of trade more calculated for the future.
The trade of Nürnberg at that time lay in the fetters of the guild system, the relic of an earlier golden time, which, aiming at the isolation of industry, which was thereby given into its hands, was the ban that opposed its progress for a length of time, alluring it to act contrary to the interests of native industry and therefore contrary to its own interests.