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Something further is due to be said of the culturalconsequences of this discipline in workmanship during the era of handicraft, besides its guidance in the growth of technology and the related field of material science. As has been intimated above, habituation to the working conceptions of handicraft had much to do with that revision of the religious cult and its theological tenets that has shaped the spiritual life of modern times in contrast with the medieval life of faith. But it is an ungrateful, perhaps ungraceful, office to turn the dry light of matter-of-fact on the sacred verities, and a degree of parsimony will best be observed in any layman’s discussion of these intimate movements of the spirit. Yet it seems necessary to call to mind at least one point of singular concomitance between the state of the industrial arts and fortunes of the Christian faith.
Characteristic of modern times has been the Protestant rehabilitation of the cult and its tenets. In this rehabilitation, which has not been without effect even within the Catholic church, much of the ancient spirit of subjection has been lost, replaced in part with a certain attitude of self-help and autonomy on the part of the laity. There is a degree of democratic initiative and a gild-like spirit of lay discretion in spiritual affairs. As already noted above, the tenets of the faith have also in some degree been revised and reconstructed in terms consonant with the workmanlike conceptions of the handicraft system. Such a protestant or quasi-protestant reconstruction of the cult and its tenets set in, as is well known, successively in the several leading countries of Europe, somewhat in the same order as these several countries successively advanced to a high level of technological and commercial enterprise. As noted above, in the southin the so-called Latin countries, this era of industrial and commercial enterprise was presently checked; the like being true in a less pronounced fashion for the peoples of Central Europe. Wherever the advance was seriously checked, so that the era of handicraft closed in collapse or reaction on its secular side, there the reconstruction of the religious cult also came to an incomplete issue at the most. So that by the definitive close of the era of handicraft those peoples of Christendom that had maintained the advance achieved in this secular respect were also the ones that had accepted and continued to hold the revised form of the faith. Where this era of industrial and business enterprise closed in exhaustion and collapse, there the ancient form of the faith also triumphed over the heretics. It is, indeed, to be remarked as a sufficiently striking coincidence that even now the centre of diffusion of the modern industry is at the same time the centre of diffusion of religious protestantism and heresy. And the antique forms and fervour of the faith are found in better preservation progressively outward from this centre of diffusion; and even in somewhat minute detail it appears to hold true not only that the more advanced industrial peoples are the less amenable to religious control and less given to superstitious observances of the archaic sort, but also that within these industrial countries the industrial centres in the narrower sense of the word are less devout, or devout in a less archaic fashion, than the non-industrial population at large. Something of the kind, indeed, has been visibly true ever since a relatively early phase of the handicraft system; though nothing like undevoutness can be alleged of the industrial town population during the handicraft era proper. The handicraftpopulation was devout, but not consistently orthodox; and the industrial towns of that time were devout enough in their way, but it was in a way obnoxious to the received dogmas of the church. They were centres of devout heresy. It is only in late modern times that the malady has progressed so far that it may fairly be called a degree of apostacy. This concomitance between technological mastery and religious dissent is doubtless susceptible of a good and serviceable explanation at the hands of the religious experts; it is here cited without prejudice as having at least a negative bearing on the question of how the discipline of the handicraft industry may be conceived to affect men’s spiritual attitude in a field so remote as that of the life of faith.131
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What is known to economic history as the era of handicraft is for the purposes of the political historian spoken of as the era of statemaking. The two designations may not cover precisely the same interval, but they coincide in a general way in point of dates, and the phenomena which have given rise to the two designations have much more than an accidental connection. It is not simply that the development of handicraft happens to fall in the same general period of history that is characterised by the dynastic wars that went to the making of the larger states. The growth of handicraft had much todo with making the large states practicable and with supplying the material means of large-scale warfare; while the traffic of dynastic politics in that time had in its turn very much to do with bringing that era of industrial and commercial enterprise to an inglorious close. The new industry supplied the sinews of war, and the wars ate up the substance of the industrial community.
The new industry gave rise to a growth of industrial towns and commercial centres, primarily occupied by the traffic of the itinerant traders. One of the immediate consequences of this extension of merchandising enterprise was the improvement of means of communication, both in the way of an extension and improvement of shipping—itself a technological fact—and in the way of improved routes of communication. A secondary consequence was a growth of population, coupled with its concentration in urban centres, together with a growth of wealth, in good part drawn together in the same centres. These changes enabled the powers in control to extend an effectual coercion over larger distances and over larger aggregations of population and wealth; it became practicable, mechanically, to swing a larger political aggregation and to hold it together in closer coördination than before. The physical conditions requisite to the formation and enduring maintenance of large political organisations were in this way supplied by the new industrial era as an incidental result of its technological efficiency.
More direct and obvious, though of no graver importance, is the contribution made by the new technology to the means of coercion placed at the disposal of the warlords, in the way of improved weapons and armour,defences and warlike appliances. The improvements worked out in the means of warfare during the early half of the era of handicraft exceed in material effect and in boldness of conception all the traceable improvements wrought in that line by all the warlike peoples of classical antiquity and all the fighting aggregations of Asia and Africa, from the beginning of the bronze age down to modern times. The craftsmen spent their best endeavours and their most brilliant ingenuity on this production of arms and munitions, with the result that these articles still lie over in the modern collections as the most finished productions of workmanship which that era has to show. The (unintended) result at large was that these improved appliances enabled the warlords and their fighting men to control the industrial classes for their own ends and to levy exactions on trade and industry up to the limit of what the traffic would bear, or perhaps more commonly somewhat over that limit. It was, in this way, their own technological mastery that furnished the means of their own undoing, directly (mechanically speaking) and indirectly (in the resulting growth of warlike sentiment).
That the craftsmen went so diligently into this production of ways and means for their own discomfort and abiding defeat is due not to any innately perverse bent of the sense of workmanship as it comes to expression in the spirit of the handicraft community, but rather to the exigencies created by the price system, with its principles of self-help,—a secondary, conventional product of the handicraft industry. As has been noted already, with perhaps tedious iteration, there runs through the handicraft community a high-wrought spirit of individualself-sufficiency. So soon as the petty trade has grown to effective dimensions the individual workman comes into somewhat direct relations with the market, and except for the collective interest and action embodied in the gild organisations the craftsmen stand in little else than a pecuniary relation to one another and bear little else than a pecuniary responsibility to their fellow craftsmen or to the community. It is the place of each to gain a livelihood by honest work through his own individual skill and enterprise. Notoriously, the craftsmen were in effect lacking in that sense of solidarity that makes an efficient organisation for defence or offence; concerted action, outside the regulative activity of the gild, was to be had only with extreme difficulty on any other basis than individual pecuniary advantage. Each worked for himself, with an eye steadily to the main chance. And the main chance, from an early date in this era, meant gain in terms of price. So the craftsman worked for such customers as would pay his price, and he spent his skill and ingenuity on such goods as were in demand. The trade in arms and weapons was good at that time. These appliances were a means of livelihood to the men at arms and a means of income and prestige to their princely employers. So the traffic went busily on, and the individual craftsmen put forth their best efforts toward enhancing the efficiency of the ruling and fighting classes, whose endeavours, without much collusion but by the inevitable drift of circumstance, converged on the subjection of the community of craftsmen at large and on the exhaustion of the community’s resources.
Through its side issue in the commercial enterprisewhich it fostered the handicraft industry brought to the hands of the politicians a further means of trouble. The trade brought on the price system, and so made it possible for ambitious princes to buy what they needed in their warlike negotiations; with funds in hand stores and munitions could be bought where they were needed, so enabling warlike operations to be carried on with greater facility at a greater distance than was feasible under the earlier rule of contributions in kind. The price system also enabled the warlords to hire mercenaries, and so to organise and maintain a standing force of skilled fighting men, mobile and irresponsible. But to hold one’s own in the competitive use of this new arm the prince must have funds; which led incontinently to all available manner of exactions on trade and commerce, since it was from these sources almost solely that funds could be had. But it led also and equally to an increasing traffic between the princes and the captains of industry, for the use of funds. Funds had become the sinews of war, since the handicraft industry had come to turn out goods for sale and the merchandising trade had made funds accessible in sufficient volume to be worth while. So the princes dealt with the captains of industry, selling what they could and hypothecating what they could not sell, in a competitive struggle to outdo one another at war and diplomacy. The game was then as always an emulative one, in which any advantage was a differential advantage only. Hence the princes engaged, each and several, needed all the funds they could get the use of, and their need was ever present, not to be deferred. Hence they borrowed what they could and where they could, their borrowings beingfloated by the help of all manner of expedients. Some of these fiscal expedients brought monopolistic advantage to the captains of industry, and so contributed to their further gain and to the concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Meantime, the princely chancelries, being in debt as far as possible, extorted further loans from the captains by seizure and by threats of bankruptcy; and whatever was borrowed was expeditiously used up in the destruction of property, population, industrial plant and international commerce. So, when all available resources of revenue and credit, present and prospective, had been exhausted, and all the accessible material had been consumed, the princely fisc went into bankruptcy, followed by its creditors, the captains of industry, followed by the business community at large with whose funds they had operated and by the industrial community, whose stock of goods and appliances was exhausted, whose trade connections were broken and whose working population had been debauched, scattered and reduced to poverty and subjection by the wars, revenue collectors and forced contributions. Meantime, too, habituation to the sentiments, ideals, standards and manner of life suitable to a state of predation had swamped the handicraft spirit and put abnegation and dependence on arbitrary power in the place of that initiative and pertinacious self-reliance that had made the era of handicraft. It was from this eventuality that England in great measure escaped by favour of her insular position and the inability of her princes to draw a reluctant industrial community into the traffic of dynastic intrigue that filled the Continent.
It will have been remarked that one of the essentialmoves in this sequence of events, from the beginnings of handicraft in impecunious and self-reliant workmanship to its eventual collapse in exhaustion, is the gradual accumulation of commercial and industrial wealth in relatively few hands. This accumulation of wealth, or rather its segregation in few hands, appears, as already indicated, to have entered as a potent factor in the course of things that lead the system of handicraft through maturity to collapse, as on the Continent, or to decay, as in England. It will accordingly be in place to go somewhat more narrowly into the circumstances of its beginnings and growth and the manner in which it plays its part in the organisation of the handicraft industry.
It appears that this uneven distribution of wealth arises out of the technological exigencies of handicraft and of the petty trade which characteristically runs along with the handicraft industry in its early stages.132In its earliest, impecunious beginnings, handicraft as known in mediæval Europe was like its congener, the manual arts of the savage and lower barbarian peoples, in that the whole material equipment requisite to its pursuit consisted of a skilled workman and an extremely slender kit of tools. The tradition countenanced by historical students says that the beginnings of the handicraft system, with its specialised industry and trained workmanship, is due to such workmen, possessed of substantially nothing but their own persons, who escaped in one way and another from the bonds of the manorial system, or its equivalent, and found shelter on sufferance near somefeudal protector or religious corporation that found some advantage in this novel arrangement.133
On looking into this inchoate working arrangement between these masterless workmen and their patrons, and generalising the run of facts as may be permitted an inquiry that aims at theoretical presentation rather than historical description, the probable causal relation running through these obscure events will appear somewhat as follows. It happened in Europe, as it has happened now and again elsewhere, that the ownership of the soil in advanced feudal times took shape as a Landed Interest living at peace and under settled relations with the community from which they drew their livelihood and their means of controlling the community. Under these circumstances there grew up an ever-widening industrial system, under manorial auspices, in which the foremost place is taken by the mechanic arts, in the way of specialised crafts and mechanical processes and appliances. The tranquil conditions that prevail under such a settled, pacific or sub-predatory scheme of control bring out an increased volume of consumable products, particularly since these same settled conditions admit a larger and more economical use of all industrial appliances. The immediate consequence is that an increased net product accrues to the propertied class; which calls them to an intensified consumption of goods; which requires increased elaboration and diversity of products; which calls for an increasing diversity and volume of appliances and more prolonged and elaborate technological processes. The needs of the propertiedclass, particularly in the way of superfluities, reach such a degree of diversity that it is no longer practicable to supply these needs by specialised work within the industrial framework of the manor or its equivalent. The itinerant trade comes in to help out in this difficult passage by bringing exotic luxuries, curious articles of great price; but that is not sufficient to cover the requirements of the case, since there is much needed work of elaboration that cannot be taken care of by way of an importation of finished goods.
Here comes the opportunity of the skilled masterless workman. The growth of wealth has provided a place for him in the economy of the time, and having once got a foothold he and his followers congregate in industrial towns and find a living by the work of their hands.
The point should be kept in mind in any consideration of the era of handicraft that its beginnings are made by these “masterless men,” who broke away (or were broken out) from the bonds of that organisation in which the arbitrary power of the landed interest held dominion. By tenacious assertion of the personal rights which they so arrogated to themselves, and at great cost and risk, they made good in time their claim to stand as a class apart, a class of ungraded free men among whom self-help and individual workmanlike efficiency were the accepted grounds of repute and of livelihood. This tradition never dies out among the organised craftsmen until the industrial system which had so been inaugurated went under in the turmoil of politics and finance or was supplanted by the machine era that grew out of it. With this class-tradition of initiative and democratic autonomy is associated, as an integral fact in the system,the concomitant tradition that work is a means of livelihood.
In these early phases of the system the individual workman is (typically) competent to work out his livelihood with the use of such a slight equipment of tools as could readily be acquired in the course of his employment. In great part, indeed, the craftsman of the early days made his tools and appliances as he went along. But it follows necessarily that further training in the skilled manipulations of the crafts led to the use of improved and specialised tools as well as to the use of larger appliances useful in the technological processes employed, such as could scarcely be called tools in the simpler sense of the word but would rather be classed as industrial plant. With the advance of technology the material equipment so requisite to the pursuit of industry in the crafts increases in volume, cost and elaboration, and the processes of industry grow extensive and complex; until it presently becomes a matter of serious difficulty for any workman single-handed to supply the complement of tools, appliances and materials with which his work is to be done. It then also becomes a matter of some moment to own such wealth.
As under any earlier and simpler industrial régime, so in this early-advanced phase of the handicraft system the workman must also have command of that immaterial equipment of technological information at large that is current in the community, in so far as it affects his particular occupation; and he must in addition acquire the special trained skill necessary in his own branch of craft. The former he will, at that stage of technological growth, still come by without particular deliberateapplication, in the ordinary routine of life; it is made up of general information and familiarity with current ways of doing, simply, and on the level of general information which then prevailed no special training or schooling seems to have been needed to place the young man abreast of his time. In other words, the common stock of technological knowledge had not by that time grown so unwieldy as to require special pains to assimilate it. As for the latter, the special skill which would make him a craftsman, that was also accessible at the cost of some application; but under the rules of handicraft the early apprentice gained this trained skill at no cost beyond application to the work in hand. But the like does not continue to hold true of the material equipment; which presently was no longer to be compassed as a matter of course and of routine application to the work in hand. It was becoming increasingly important and increasingly difficult to be provided with these means with which to go to work, and the ownership of such means gave an increasingly decisive advantage to their owner.
What adds further force to this position of affair is the fact that in many of the crafts the work could no longer be carried on to full advantage in strict severalty; the best approved processes required a gang or corps of workmen in coöperation, and required also something in the way of a “plant” suitable for the employment of such a corps rather than of a single individual. Such a condition, of course, came on earlier and more urgently in some crafts, as, e. g., in tanning, or brewing, or some of the metal-working trades, than in others, as, e. g., the building trades, locksmithing, cobbling, etc. Butan advance of this kind, and the exigencies which such an advance brings, came on gradually and with such a measure of general prevalence through the crafts that the general statement made above may fairly stand as a free characterisation of the state of the industrial arts in the crafts at large at the period in question. The growing resort to working methods requiring organised groups of workmen together with something in the way of collective industrial plant would greatly hasten the concentration of the ownership of the material equipment. Ownership in all ages is individual ownership; and then as ever any single item of property, such as a workshop and its appliances, would presently fall into the possession of an individual owner. The owners of the plant became employers of their impecunious fellow craftsmen and so came into a position to dispose of their working capacity and their product.
When and in so far as the advanced state of the industrial arts, therefore, made it impracticable for the individual craftsman readily to acquire the material means for work in his craft, any proficiency in the craft would be of no effect except by arrangement with some one who could supply these material means. The possession of the material equipment, therefore, placed in the discretion of its owners the utilisation of such technological knowledge and skill as the members of the given crafts might possess. The usufruct of the handicraft community’s technological proficiency in this way came to vest in the owners of the plant, in the same measure as this plant was necessary to the pursuit of industry under the technological scheme then in force. This effect would be had so soon and in such measure asit became a matter of appreciable difficulty to acquire and maintain the material equipment requisite to the workmanlike pursuit of industry; and it would become generally decisive of the relation between master and workman so soon as the outfit of material means required for effective work had grown larger than the common run of workmen could acquire in the course of such training as would fit them to do the work in the particular branch of industry in which they engaged.
The change brought on in this way by the growth of technology was neither abrupt nor sharply defined. Like other changes in the technological scheme it was an outgrowth of the knowledge and methods already previously current, and it took effect in detail and in a very concrete way, leading on through fluctuating usage to a gradually settled general practice which came at length to differ substantially from the situation out of which it had grown. By insensible gradations it came into such general prevalence and everyday recognition, and established such stable methods of procedure, as presently left it standing as an established institutional fact. It grew into the prevalent habits of thought without a visible break, and made its way more or less thoroughly in the several branches of industry which it touched, until it came to be accepted as the type of handicraft organisation to which other, outlying branches of industry would then also tend to conform, even when there was no direct provocation for these outlying members of the industrial system to take on the typical form so given. But given the tranquil conditions necessary to the accumulation of such industrial appliances and to the invention and employment of long and roundabout processes in industry,and the resulting change that sets in will be of a cumulative character, affecting an ever increasing proportion of the industrial arts, and permeating the industrial system at large in a progressive fashion.
Under these circumstances, and in proportion as these technological exigencies take effect in one branch of industry and another, the usufruct of the industrial community’s current productive efficiency comes to vest effectually in those who own the material means of industry. Their effectual exploitation of the community’s industrial efficiency will extend to such industries, and with such a degree of thoroughness and security, as the state of the industrial arts may decide. This effectual engrossing of the technological heritage by the owners will extend to any branch of the industrial arts in which so considerable a material equipment is required, in appliances and raw materials, that the workmen who go into this given line of employment cannot practically create or acquire it as they go along. In an uncertain measure, therefore, and varying in degree somewhat from one industry to another, the owner of the plant becomes in effect the owner of the community’s technological knowledge and workmanlike skill, and thereby the owner of the workman’s productive capacity.
In the small beginnings of the handicraft industry the craftsman typically passed by a simple routine from the status of apprentice to that of master, picking up the slight necessary outfit as he went along; in the closing phases of the era handicraft methods had reached a high degree of specialisation and made use of extensive processes and appliances, and it was then only by exception that any craftsman could pass from apprenticeshipthrough the intervening stages to the position of a working master, without the help of inherited means or special favour. Toward the close of the era the masters were, typically, employers of skilled labour and foremen in their own shop, except in the frequent case where they altogether ceased to work at the trade and gave their whole attention to the business side of the industry. Many of these nominal master craftsmen were in fact mere traders, captains of industry, businessmen, who never came in manual contact with the work.134
So capitalism emerged from the working of the handicraft system, through the increasing scale and efficiency of technology. And on the ground afforded by this capitalistic phase of the system arose that era of business enterprise that ruled the economic fortunes of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its captains of industry and great financial houses. Whether the large means with which these captains of industry operated were primarily drawn from the gains of the petty trade that had gone before, or were drawn into this field of business from outside, is a debated question which need not detain the present inquiry. The fact remains that, by whatever means, this development of the situation comes out of that growth of handicraft whereby the ownership and control of the industrial plant passed out of the hands of the body of working craftsmen.
When this business situation collapsed, therefore, as already spoken of above, the handicraft industry at its best was organised on capitalistic lines and managed for capitalistic ends,—with a view to profits on investment, not primarily with a view to the livelihood of the workingcraftsmen. The new situation which then presented itself, as a consequence of the collapse of the business community, was industrially and commercially better suited to the simpler and ruder methods of handicraft that had succeeded in the early days of the system; but the current preconceptions and trade relations that actually ruled at the time were of a capitalistic kind, and the current state of the industrial arts, even where industry had fallen into a fragmentary state, was such as technologically required the large-scale organisation in order to its due working. Between the impossibility of going forward on the accustomed lines and the impracticability of an effectual rehabilitation of more primitive methods, there resulted a period of poverty and confusion, helped out by the continued mismanagement of the dynastic politicians; so that the industrial situation of the Continent never recovered until it was overtaken by the new era of the machine industry inaugurated by the English.
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The circumstances of life for the common man underwent more than one substantial change during the era of handicraft, and these changes were not all in the same sense. The dominant note changes from workmanship in the earlier phases of the era to pecuniary competition and political anxiety toward the close, particularly as regards the industrial communities of the Continent. The era is a long period of history, all told, running over some five or six centuries, from an advanced stage of the feudal age to the eighteenth century, or to various earlier dates in those countries where the handicraft system came to a provisional close in the era of statemaking; and the discipline of life does not run tothe same effect in the earlier of these phases of the development as in the later. Not that handicraft ceased to be the prevailing method in the mechanical industries of these countries when the reaction overtook them, but the technological advance had been seriously checked, and such handicraft industry as still went on had ceased to dominate the economic situation and no longer held the primacy among the factors that shaped the life of the communities in question. Its place as a dominant force was taken by the new political interests and by such commercial enterprise as still went on.
But through the centuries of its earlier growth the handicraft industry, simply as a routine of workmanship, shaped the conditions of life for the common people more pervasively and consistently than any other one factor. Its discipline, therefore, was of protracted duration and touched the current habits of thought in an intimate and enduring fashion; so as to leave a large and enduring effect on the institutions of the peoples among whom it prevailed. The English-speaking community shows these effects in a larger measure and a more evident manner than any other,—visible only in a less degree in the Low Countries, and more equivocally in the Scandinavian countries. These peoples had not been subjected to the handicraft discipline for a longer time or in a more exacting fashion than their Continental neighbours, but they had on the other hand escaped the full measure of the political activity of the era of statemaking that did so much to neutralise the effects of the handicraft system in the larger Continental countries.
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Something has been said above of the way in which thediscipline of life under the rule of handicraft shaped and coloured men’s thinking in those materialistic sciences whose early growth runs parallel with the technological advance in modern times. It has also been evident that this training in the manner of conceiving things for the purposes of technology wrought certain broad changes in the theological and philosophical conceptions that guided the inquiring spirits of the same and subsequent generations. This effect wrought by the routine of life under the handicraft system on scientific and philosophical conceptions is of a very pervasive character, being of the nature of an habitual bent, an attitude or frame of mind, whose characteristic mark is the acceptance of creative workmanship as a finality. It became an element of common sense in the apprehension of thoughtful men whose frame of mind was formed under the traditions of that era that creative workmanship is an ultimate, irreducible factor in the constitution of things, accepted as a matter of course and used unsparingly and with ever-growing conviction as aterminus a quoandad quem.135
Creative workmanship, fortified in ever-growing measure by the conception of serviceability to human use, works its way gradually into the central place in the theoretical speculations of the time, so that by the close of the era it dominates all intellectual enterprise in the thoughtful portions of Christendom. Hence it becomes not only the instrument of inquiry in the sciences, but amajor premise in all work of innovation and reconstruction of the scheme of institutions. In that extensive revision of the institutional framework that characterises modern times it is the life of the common people, their rights and obligations, that is forever in view, and their life is conceived in terms of craftsmanlike industry and the petty trade. By and large, the outcome of this revision of civil and legal matters under handicraft auspices is the system of Natural Rights, including the concept of Natural Liberty. The whole scheme so worked out is manifestly of the same piece with that Order of Nature and Natural Law that dominated the inquiries of the scientists and the speculations of the philosophers.
It lies in the nature of the case that the English-speaking community should take the lead in the final advance in all these matters and should work out the most finished, secure and enduring results within these premises, both in the field of scientific inquiry and in that of the theory of institutions. It lies in the nature of the case because the English-speaking community had the benefit of the technological gains made before their time, because they had a long and passably uneventful experience of the handicraft routine in industry and in the workday life to whose wants the handicraft industry ministered, and because the discipline of the handicraft era was not in their case neutralised in its closing phase by the turmoil, insecurity and civic debaucheries of an epoch of war and political intrigue. And here again the neighbouring peoples come into the case as copartners in this work with England in much the same measure in which their experience through this period was of the same general nature.
The scheme of Natural Rights, and of Natural Liberty, which so emerges is of a pronounced individualistic tenor, as it should be to answer to the scheme of experience embodied in the system of handicraft. In the crafts, particularly during the protracted early phases of the system, it is the individual workman, working for a livelihood by use of his own personal force, dexterity and diligence, that stands out as the main fact; so much so, indeed, that he appears to have stood, in the apprehension of his time, as the sole substantial factor in the industrial organisation. Similarly under the canon of Natural Liberty the individual is thrown on his own devices for his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The craftsman by immemorial custom traditionally disposed of his work and its product as he chose, under the rules of his gild. He was by prescription in full possession of what he made, subject only to the gild regulations imposed for the good of his neighbours who were similarly placed. The most sacred right included in the scheme of Natural Rights is that of property in whatever wealth has been honestly acquired, subject only to the qualification that it must not be turned to the detriment of one’s fellows. In the days of the typical handicraft system the petty trade runs along with the handicraft industry, in such a way that every master craftsman is more or less of a trader, disposing of his goods or services in plenary discretion, and even the apprentices and journeymen similarly bargain for their terms of work and at times for the disposal of their product; while the professional itinerant trader is a member of this industrial community on much the same footing as the craftsmen proper. So it is a secure item in the schemeof Natural Rights that all persons not under tutelage have an indefeasible right to dispose by purchase and sale not only of products of their own hands but of whatever items they have come by through alienation by its producer or lawful owner. And ownership is in natural-rights theory always to be traced back to the creative workmanship of its first possessor.136
In the sequel this natural right freely to dispose of one’s person and work, when it had found lodgment among the principles of civil rights in the eighteenth century, contributed substantially to the dissolution of that organ of surveillance and control that the craftsmen of an earlier generation had instituted in the gild system. The case is but an instance of what is continually happening and bound to happen in the field of institutional growth. Institutional principles, such as this item of civil rights, emerge from use and wont, resulting as a settled line of convention from usage and custom that grow out of the exigencies of life at the time. But use and wont is a matter of time. It takes time for habituation to attain that secure degree of conventional recognition and authenticity that will enable it to stand as an indefeasible principle of conduct, and by the time this consummation is achieved it commonly happens that the exigencies which enforced the given line of use and wont have ceased to be operative, or at least tobe so imperative as in their earlier incidence. The control which the gilds were initially designed to exercise was a control that should leave the gildsmen free in the pursuit of their work, subject only to a salutary surveillance and standardisation of the output, such as would maintain the prestige of their workmanship and facilitate the disposal of the goods produced. The initial purpose seems, in modern phrase, to have been a creation of intangible assets for the benefits of the body of gildmen. Under the new conditions that came to prevail when capitalistic management took over the direction of industry these gild regulations no longer served their purpose, but they seem on the contrary to have become an obstacle to the free employment of skilled workmen.
A similar fortune was about the same time beginning to overtake this principle of Natural Liberty itself, and that even in the particular bearing which seems at the outset to have been its primary and most substantial aim. Initially, it seems, the point of interest, and indeed of contention, was the freedom of the masterless workman to dispose of his person and workmanship as he saw fit and as he best could and would,—to take care of his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness without let or hindrance from persons vested with authority or prerogative. With the passage of time, use and wont erected this conventional rule into an inalienable right. But included with it, as an integral extension of the powers which this inalienable right safeguarded, was the right of purchase and sale, touching both work and its product, the right freely to hold and dispose of property. Presently, toward the close of the handicraft era, or more specifically in the late eighteenth century in England,industry fell under capitalistic management. When this change had taken passably full effect the workman was already secure in his civil (natural) right to dispose of his workmanship as he thought best, but the circumstances of employment under capitalistic management made it impossible for him in fact to dispose of his work except to these employers, and very much on their terms, or to dispose of his person except where the exigencies of their business might require him. And the similarly inalienable right of ownership, which had similarly emerged from use and wont under the handicraft system, but which now in effect secured the capitalist-employer in his control of the material means of industry,—this sacred right of property now barred out any move that might be designed to reinstate the workman in his effective freedom to work as he chose or to dispose of his person and product as he saw fit.
The connection so shown between the growth of handicraft and the system of Natural Rights does not purport to be a complete account of the rise of that system, even in outline. The more usual account traces this system to the concept ofjus naturale, of the late Roman jurists. There is assuredly no call here to question or disparage the work of those jurists and scholars who have busied themselves with authenticating the system of Natural Rights by showing it to be founded in thejus gentiumand thejus naturaleof the Latin Codes. Their work is doubtless historically exact and competent. But as is commonly the case with such work at the hands of jurists and scholars, especially in that past age, it contents itself with tracing an authentic pedigree, rather than go into questions of the causes that led to the vogueof these concepts at the time of their acceptance or the circumstances which gave these Natural Rights that particular scope and content which they have assumed in modern theory of law and civil relations. The thesis which is here offered is to the effect that the habituation of use and wont under the handicraft system installed these rights, in an inchoate fashion, in the current preconceptions of the community, and that this habituation is traceable, causally rather than by process of ratiocination, to the sense of workmanship as it took form and went into action under the particular conventional circumstances of the early era of handicraft; that the preconceptions that so went into effect determined the current attitude of thoughtful men toward questions of civil rights and legal principle; and that the jurists who had occasion to take notice of these current preconceptions touching human rights found themselves constrained to deal with them as elementary facts in the situation as it lay before them, and therefore to find a ground for them in the accepted canons, such as would satisfy the legal mind of their authenticity by ancient prescription, or such as should determine the scope of their application in conformity with legal principles having a prior claim and authoritative sanction. The thesis, therefore, is not that the jurists founded these modern principles of legal theory on the popular prejudices current in their time and due in point of habituation to the routine of handicraft, nor that they stretched the ancient principles ofjus naturaleto meet the demands of popular prejudice, but that on prompting of legal exigencies to which the practical acceptance of these principles had given rise, the jurists found in the capitulariesof the code what was necessary to authenticate these principles of legal theory and give them the sanction of authority,—a work of reasoning all the more congenial and convincing to the jurists since they in common with the rest of their generation were by habit and tradition imbued with the penchant to find these principles right and good, and consequently to find none other in the codes that might fatally traverse those whose authentication was due. But these are matters of pedigree, and this work of the great jurists and philosophers is in great part of the nature of accessory after the fact, so far as bears on that sweeping acceptance of these principles and that incontestable efficiency that marks the course of their life-history in modern times. The jurists and philosophers have sought and shown the sufficient reason for accepting this scheme of principles, as well as for the particular fashion in which they have been formulated; but the insensible growth of habits of thought induced by the conditions of life in (early) modern times must be allowed to stand as the efficient cause of their dominant control over modern practice, speculation, and sentiment touching all those relations that have been standardised in their terms. By use and wont the range of conventional elements included in the scheme had become eternal and indubitable principles of right reason, ingrained in the intellectual texture of the jurists as well as in their lay contemporaries; and the task of the jurists therefore was to work out their authentication in terms of sufficient reason; it was not for them to trouble with any question of the causes to which these principles owed their eternal fitness in the scheme of Nature at that particular time.
The Natural Rights which so found authentication at the hands of the jurists were of the individualistic kind which the discipline of the handicraft system had inculcated, and the authentication found in thejus naturaledoes not range much beyond the individualistic bounds so prescribed, nor are other lines of ancient prescription, at variance with these rights, brought at all prominently into the light by the legal inquiries of the jurists. Whereas it is no matter of serious question that the chief bearing of the ancient findings embodied in the code is not of this individualistic character. The causes which brought on the modern acceptance of this scheme of Natural Rights are a matter of use and wont, quite distinct from that line of argument by which the jurists established them on grounds of sufficient reason resting on ancient prescription.
The extreme tenacity of life shown by the system of Natural Rights may raise a reasonable doubt as to the adequacy of any account that assigns their derivation to the discipline of use and wont peculiar to any particular cultural era, even when the era in question is of so consistent a character and such protracted duration as the era of handicraft. What adds force to such a question is the fact that something like these preconceptions of natural right is not uncommon in the lower cultures. So that on the face of the returns there appears to be good ground in the nature of things for designating these conventional rights “natural.” Something of the kind is current in an obvious fashion among the peaceable communities on the lower levels of culture, among whom the scheme of accepted rights and obligations bears more than a distant resemblance to the Natural Rightsof the eighteenth century. But something of the kind will also be found among peoples on a higher level, both peaceable and predatory; though departing more notably in point of contents from the eighteenth-century system. The point of similarity, or of identity, among all these systems of conventionally fundamental and eternal human rights is to be found in their intrinsic sanction—they are all and several right and good as a matter of course and of common sense; the point of divergence or dissimilarity is to be found in the contents of the code, which are not nearly the same in all cases. In the mediæval natural common-sense scheme of rights, prerogative, personal and class exemption, is of the essence of the canon; but the scheme is none the less intrinsically mandatory on those who had been bred into a matter-of-course acceptance of it by the routine of life in that age. Differential rights, duties and privilege give the point of departure in this mediæval system of civil relations; whereas in the system worked out under the auspices of the handicraft industry the denial of differential advantage, whether class or individual, is the beginning of wisdom and the substance of common sense as applied to civil relations. The one of these schemes comes out of an economic situation drawn on lines of predation, ancient, prescriptive and settled, and its first principle is that of master and servant; the other comes of a situation grounded in workmanlike efficiency, and its first principle is that of an equitable livelihood for work done.
That some of the working systems of civil rights in customary force among the peaceable communities of the lower culture have more in common with modern Natural Rights than this mediæval scheme, should logicallybe due to a similarity in the conditions of life out of which they have arisen. In these savage or lower barbarian communities, too, the principle of organization is work for a livelihood, and the conventional ground of economic relations is that of workmanship, as it is under the early handicraft system; but with the difference that whereas the technology of handicraft throws the skilled workman into perspective as a self-sufficient individual, and so throws self-help into the foreground as the principle of economic equity, among these savages and lower barbarians living by means of a technology of a less highly specialised character, with a material situation not admitting of the same degree of severalty in work or livelihood, the prime requisite in the relations governing the rights and duties of the members of the group is not the individual livelihood of the skilled workman but that of the group at large. The individual’s personal claims come in only as secondary and subservient to the needs of the group at large; rights of ownership are loose and vague, and they lack that tenacity of life that characterises the like rights under the handicraft system. It is true, the product of industry belongs primarily to the producer of it, it is his in some sense that might pass into ownership if the technological situation admitted of work for a livelihood in strict and consistent severalty; but in the actual case as found on these lower levels the product commonly escapes somewhat easily from his individual possession and comes to inure to the use of the group. Except for such articles as continue to pertain to him by virtue of intimate and daily use, the producer’s possessive control of his product is likely at the best to be transient and dubious, readily giving way before anyurgent call for its use by other members of the group.137
A fact of some incisive effect in this connection is doubtless the characteristic trait of handicraft that, in its early phases wholly and obviously and in its later development also somewhat evidently, it was the affair of a class; whereas in the savage communities with which it is here compared, the technology and the livelihood in question are those of the community at large, not of a class that stands in contrast and in some degree of competition with the community at large. The craftsmen were a fraction of the community by work for whose needs they got their livelihood, even though, in the course of time, they became the dominant element within the local community (municipality) whose fortunes they shared. And as between this fraction of the population and outside classes with whom they carried on their traffic, particularly the well-to-do and land-holding classes, there could be no constraining sense of a solidarity of interest. The ancient bond of master and servant had been broken by something like an overt act of class secession on the part of the craftsmen, and nothing like a bond of fellowship had taken its place. The fellowship ran within the lines of craftsmanship, while the traffic of each craftsman typically ran across the line that divided the craftsman from the old order and population outside of this industrial system.
That the eighteenth-century system of Natural Rights shows such a degree of approximation to the scheme of rights and obligations observed among many primitive peoples need flutter no one’s sense of cultural consistency. Return to Nature was more or less of a password in the closing period of the era of handicraft and after, and in respect of this system of civil relations it appears that the popular attitude of that time was in effect something of a reversion to primitive habits of thought; though it was at best a partial return to a “state of nature” in the sense of a state of peace and industry rather than a return to the unsophisticated beginnings of society. That such a partial reversion takes effect in the habits of thought of the time appears to be due to a similarly partial return to somewhat analogous habits of life. The correspondence in the habits of thought is no greater than that in the habits of life out of which these habits of thought emerged. The primitive peoples that show this suggestive resemblance to the system of Natural Rights typically are living under a routine of workmanship and in a state of habitual peace,—in these respects being placed somewhat similarly to the handicraft community. The handicraft system comes true to the same characterisation in so far that it was dominated by a routine of workmanship and so far as, in effect, its life-history falls in an era of prevailingly peaceable conditions; and such a characterisation holds true of the industrial community proper through the period during which handicraft is the ruling factor in the community’s habitual range of interest. It is not that the era of handicraft was an era of reversion to savagery, but only that the tone-giving factor in the community of thattime reverted, by force of the state of the industrial arts, to habits of peace and industry, in which direct and detailed manual work takes a leading place. There is also the further point of economic contact with the savage state that in the handicraft community distinctions of wealth are neither large nor of decisive consequence during the long period of habituation that brought the preconceptions of that era into the settled shape that gave them the character of a finished and balanced system of principles.
It may be added, at the risk of tedious repetition, that the habits of life characteristic of the era, as well as the frame of mind suited to this characteristic routine of life, seem peculiarly suited to the native endowment of the European peoples,—perhaps in an especial degree suited to the native bent of those sections of the population in which there is an appreciable admixture of the dolicho-blond stock. That such may be the case is at least strongly suggested by the tenacious hold which this system of Rights apparently still has on the sentimental allegiance of these Western peoples, after the conditions to which these Rights owe their rise, and to which they are suited, have in the main ceased to exist; as well as by the somewhat blind fervour with which these peoples, and more especially the English-speaking section of them, go about the idyllic enterprise of rehabilitating that obsolescent “competitive system” that embodied the system of Natural Rights, and that came up with the era of handicraft and went under in its dissolution.