This technological infirmity of the businessmen assuredly does not arise from a lack of interest in industry, since it is only out of the net product of industry that the business community’s gains are drawn—except so far as they are substantially gains of accountancy merely, due to an inflation of values. Perhaps no class of men have ever been more keenly alert in their interest in industrial matters than the modern businessmen; and this interest extends not only to the industrial ventures in which they may for the time be pecuniarily “interested,” but also and necessarily to other lines of industry that are more or less closely correlated with the one in which the given businessman’s fortunes are embarked; for under modern market conditions any given line of industrial enterprise is bound in endless relations of give and take with all the rest. But this unremitting attention of businessmen to the affairs of industry is a business attention, and, so far as may be, it touches nothing but the pecuniary phenomena connected with the ownership of industry; so that it comes rather to a training in the art of keeping in touch with the pecuniary run of business affairs while avoiding all undue intimacy with the technological facts of industry,—undue in the sense of being in excess of what may serve the needs of a comprehensive short-term outlook over market relations, and which would therefore divert attention from this main interest and befog the pecuniary logic by which businessmen are governed.
Probably, also, no class of men have ever bent more unremittingly to their work than the modern business community. Within the business community there is properly speaking no leisure class, or at least no idle class. In this respect there is a notable contrast between the business community and the landed interest. What there is to be found in this modern culture in the way of an idle class, considered as an institution, runs back for its origins and its specific traits to a more archaic cultural scheme; it is a survival from an earlier (predatory) phase of the pecuniary culture. In the nature of things an idle life of fashion is an affair of the nobility (gentry), of predatory antecedents and, under current conditions, of predatory-parasitic habits; and as regards those modern rich men who withdraw from the business community and fall into a state of otium cum dignitate, it is commonly their fortune to be assimilated by a more or less ceremonial induction into the body of this quasi-predatory gentry or nobility and so assume an imitative colouring of archaism.
The business community is hard at work, and there is no place in it for anyone who is unable or unwilling to work at the high tension of the average; and since this close application to pecuniary work is of a competitive nature it leaves no chance for any of the competitors to apply himself at all effectually to other than pecuniary work. This high tension of work is felt to be very meritorious in all modern communities, somewhat in proportion as they are modern; as is necessarily the case in any work that is substantially of an emulative character. It spends itself on salesmanship, not on workmanship in the naïve sense; although the all-pervading preoccupation with pecuniary matters in modern times has led to its being accounted the type of workmanlike endeavour. It concerns itself ultimately with the pecuniary manipulation of the material equipment of industry, though there is much of it that does not bear immediately on that point. The exceptions under this broad proposition are more apparent than real, although there doubtless are exceptions actual as well as apparent. In such a case the business transactions in question are likely to bear on the ownership of certain specific elements of the immaterial technological equipment, as e. g., habits of thought covered by parent-right or mechanical expedients covered by franchise. Beyond these there are elements of “good-will” that are subject of traffic and that consist in preferential advantages in respect of purely pecuniary transactions having to do not with the material equipment but with the right to deal with it and its management, as e. g., in banking, underwriting, insurance, and the phenomena of the money market at large.
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But the mature business situation as it runs today is a complex affair, large and intricate, wherein the effective relations in which business traffic stands to workmanship and to the community’s immaterial equipment of technological knowledge at large are greatly obscured by their own convolutions and by the institutional arrangements and convictions to which this traffic has given rise. So that the matter is best approached by way of a genetic exposition that shall take as its point of departure that simpler business enterprise of early modern times out of which the larger development of the present has grown by insensible accretions and displacements.
Business enterprise came in the course of time to take over the affairs of industry and so to withdraw these affairs from the tutelage of the gilds. This shifting of the effectual discretion in the management of industrial affairs came on gradually and in varying fashion and degree over a considerable interval of time. But the decisive general circumstance that enforced this move into the modern way of doing was an advance in the scope and method of workmanship.[120] What threw the fortunes of the industrial community into the hands of the owners of accumulated wealth was essentially a technological change, or rather a complex of technological changes, which so enlarged the requirements in respect of material equipment that the impecunious workmen could no longer carry on their trade except by a working arrangement with the owners of this equipment; whereby the discretionary control of industry was shifted from the craftsmen’s technological mastery of the ways of industry to the owner’s pecuniary mastery of the material means. In the change that so took place to a larger technological scale much was doubtless due to the extension of trade, itself in great part an outcome of technological changes, directly and indirectly. For the craftsmen and their work the outcome was that recourse must be had to the material equipment owned by those who owned it, and on such terms as would content the owners; whereby the usufruct of the workmen’s proficiency and of the state of the industrial arts fell to the owners of the material equipment, on such terms as might be had.[121] So it fell to these owners of the material means and of the products of industry to turn this technological situation to account for their own gain, with as little abatement as might be, and at the same time it became incumbent on them each and several competitively to divert as large a share of the community’s productive efficiency to his own profit as the circumstances would permit.
CHAPTER VI
The Era of Handicraft[122]
Owing, probably, to the peculiar topography of Europe, small-scale and broken, the pastoral-predatory culture has never been fully developed or naturalised in this region; nor has a monarchy of the great type characteristic of western Asia ever run its course in Europe. The nearest approach to such a despotic state would be the Roman Empire; which was after all essentially Mediterranean, largely Levantine, rather than peculiarly European. And owing probably to the same conditioning limitations of topography the subsequent sequence of institutional phenomena have also been characteristically different in this European region from that in the large and fertile lands of the near East. It is necessarily this run of events in the Western culture that is of chief interest to the present inquiry; which will therefore most conveniently follow the historical outlines of this culture in its later phases, in so far as these outlines are to be drawn in economic terms of a large generality.
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In a passably successful fashion the peoples of Christendom made the transition from a frankly predatory and servile establishment, in the Dark Ages, to a settled, quasi-peaceable situation resting on fairly secure property rights, chiefly in land, by the close of the Middle Ages. This transition was accompanied by a growth of handicraft, itinerant merchandising and industrial towns, so massive as to outlive and displace the feudal system under whose tutelage it took its rise, and of so marked a technological character as to have passed into history as the “era of handicraft.” Technologically, this era is marked by an ever advancing growth of craftsmanship; until it passes over into the régime of the machine industry when its technology had finally outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty trade that gave it its character as a distinct phase of economic history. In its beginning the handicraft system was made up of impecunious craftsmen, working in severalty and working for a livelihood, and the rules of the craft-gilds that presently took shape and exercised control were drawn on that principle.[123] The petty trade which characteristically runs along with the development of handicraft was carried on after the same detail fashion and was presently organised on lines afforded by the same principle of work for a livelihood.