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540
viii. commerce.
trading in the rural districts, although under certain conditions and at specified
distances from the towns. The ordinance of June 18, 1864, was more radical
and permitted almost unconditional freedom of trade. By later ordinances,
however, peddling has been made subject to special permission from the local
provincial authorities.
The important old fairs, at which trading in all kinds of goods was free,
have lost a great deal of their importance in our own days and are
becoming superseded by the more frequently recurring market days and
monthly meetings, at which agricultural produce and the products of
home industries (hemslöjd) etc. are sold, and by regular cattle markets.
The inland trade of Sweden is largely carried on by means of very
numerous, but generally small, steamers, which maintain a brisk traffic
in the innumerable lakes and water-ways, and along the coast. During
the most recent decades, however, the railivays have entered into keen
competition for this trade. The highroads, along which in earlier days
there passed an endless succession of gigantic loaded waggons — which
provided the chief means of subsistence over large stretches of the country
-— have, however, lost more and more of their importance for inland
trade, except for the more distant regions of North Sweden, where, to a
large extent, things have naturally remained where they were.
Commercial Education.
As far back as 1734 a Trade Statute prescribed a certain period of
apprenticeship (generally from 11 */2 to 12 years) as a condition for the
right to carry on a trade, and also enacted that the applicant should
be examined in commercial subjects by two business men. The employer
was certainly required to give his apprentice not only practical experience,
but also a theoretical knowledge of his trade; but it is clear that these
amounted to very little as a rule, and with the expansion of trade and the
increasing importance of the mercantile community, the need of real
commercial schools became more and more pressing.
The first known commercial school of any importance was founded towards
the end of the 18th century at öringe in Halland by Councillor Wurmb, without
doubt the same man who had previously aided in the establishment of the
Commercial School at Hamburg. The number of its pupils at times reached 40,
and many of the merchants who, at the beginning of the 19th century, were
regarded as the most prominent merchants in Gothenburg had received their
mercantile education there. However, about 1790 the founder and owner of the
school went into bankruptcy, and the establishment was closed.
The manifest decline in the commerce of Sweden during the second and the early
part of the third decades of the 19th century caused public attention to be directed
once more to the lack of business training among the mercantile community.
The Riksdag of 1823 therefore urged the desirability of establishing commercial
schools or a central "Commercial and Navigation Institute". The motion was
referred to the Gothenburg Mercahtile Society, and led to the establishment of
the Gothenburg Commercial Institute, which was opened in 1826 under the auspices
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