Presently, however, in early modern times, larger holdings of property came to be employed in the itinerant trade, and investment for a profit found its way into this trade as also into the handicraft system proper. The processes of industry grew more extensive and roundabout, the specialisation of occupations (“division of labour”) increased, the scale of organisation grew larger, and the practice of employing impecunious workmen in organised bodies under the direction of wealthier masters came to be the prevailing form taken by the industry of the time.
From near the beginnings of the handicraft system, and throughout the period of its flourishing, the output of the industry was habitually sold at a price, in terms of money. In the earlier days the price was regulated on the basis of labour cost, on the principle that a competent craftsman must be allowed a fair livelihood, and much thought and management was spent on the determination and maintenance of such a “just price.” But in the course of generations, with further development of trade and markets, this conception of price by degrees gave way to or passed over into the modern presumption that any article of value is worth what it will bring; until, when the era of handicraft and petty trade merges in the late-modern régime of investment and machine industry, it has become the central principle of pecuniary relations that price is a matter to be arranged freely between buyer and seller on the basis of bargain and sale.
The characteristic traits of this era are the handicraft industry and the petty trade which handled the output of that industry, with the trade gradually coming into a position of discretionary management, and even dominating the industry of the craftsmen to such an extent that by the date when the technology of handicraft begins to give way to the factory organisation and the machine industry the workmen are already somewhat fully under the control of the businessmen. Visibly, the ruling cause of this change in the relations between the craftsmen on the one hand and the traders and master-employers on the other hand was the increasing magnitude of the material means necessary to the pursuit of industry, due to such a growth of technology as required an ever larger, more finished and more costly complement of appliances. So that in the course of the era of handicraft the ancient relation between owners and workmen gradually re-established itself within the framework of the new technology; with the difference that the owners in whose hands the discretion now lay, and to whose gain the net output of industry now inured, were the businessmen, investors, the owners of the industrial plant and of the apparatus of trade, instead of as formerly the owners of the soil.
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Under the handicraft system, and to the extent to which that system shaped the situation, the instinct of workmanship again came into a dominant position among the factors that made up the discipline of daily life and so gave their characteristic bent to men’s habits of thought. In the technology of handicraft the central fact is always the individual workman, whether in the crafts proper or in the petty trade. In that era industry is conceived in terms of the skill, initiative and application of the trained individual, and human relations outside of the workshop tend also by force of habit to be conceived in similar terms of self-sufficient individuals, each working out his own ends in severalty.
The position of the craftsman in the economy of that time is peculiarly suited to induce a conception of the individual workman as a creative agent standing on his own bottom, and as an ultimate, irreducible factor in the community’s make-up. He draws on the resources of his own person alone; neither his ancestry nor the favour of his neighbours have visibly yielded him anything beyond an equivalent for work done; he owes nothing to inherited wealth or prerogative, and he is bound in no relation of landlord or tenant to the soil. With his slight outfit of tools he is ready and competent of his own motion to do the work that lies before him, and he asks nothing but an even chance to do what he is fit to do. Even the training which has given him his finished skill he has come by through no special favour or advantage, having given an equivalent for it all in the work done during his apprenticeship and so having to all appearance acquired it by his own force and diligence. The common stock of technological knowledge underlying all special training was at that time still a sufficiently simple and obvious matter, so that it was readily acquired in the routine of work, without formal application to the learning of it; and any indebtedness to the community at large or to past generations for such common stock of information would therefore not be sufficiently apparent to admit of its disturbing the craftsman’s naïve appraisal of his productive capacity in the simple and complacent terms of his own person.
The man who does things, who is creatively occupied with fashioning things for use, is the central fact in the scheme of things under the handicraft system, and the range of concepts by use of which the technological problems of that era are worked out is limited by the habit of mind so induced in those who have the work in hand and in those who see it done. The discipline of the crafts inculcates the apprehension of mechanical facts and processes in terms of workmanlike endeavour and achievement; so that questions as to what forces are available for use, and of how to turn them to account, present themselves in terms of muscular force and manual dexterity. Mechanical appliances for use in industry are designed and worked out as contrivances to facilitate or to abridge manual labour, and it is in terms of labour that the whole industrial system is conceived and its incidence, value and output rated.
Such a fashion of conceiving the operations and appliances of industry seems at the same time to fall in closely with men’s natural bent as given by the native instinct of workmanship; and fostered by the consistent drift of daily routine under the handicraft system this attitude grew into matter of course, and has continued to direct men’s thinking on industrial matters even long after the era of handicraft has passed and given place to the factory system and the large machine industry. So much so that throughout the nineteenth century, in economic speculations as well as in popular speech, the mechanical plant employed in industry has habitually been spoken of as “labour saving devices;” even such palpable departures from the manual workmanship of handicraft as the power loom, the smelting furnace, artificial waterways and highways, the steam engine and telegraphic apparatus, have been so classed.
There need be no question but that these phenomena of the machine era will bear such an interpretation; the point of interest here is that such an interpretation should have been resorted to and should have commended itself as adequate and satisfactory when applied to these mechanical facts whose effective place in technology and in its bearing on the economy of human life has turned out to be so widely different from that range of manual operations with which it is so sought to assimilate them.[124]
The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an habitual apprehension of mechanical forces and processes in terms of manual workmanship,—muscular force and craftsmanlike manipulation. This discipline touches first, and most intimately and coercively, the classes engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also necessarily pervades the community at large and gathers in its net all individuals and classes who have to do with the facts of industry, near or remote. It gives its specific character to the habits of life of the community that lives under its dispensation and by its means, and so it acts as an overruling formative guide in shaping the current habits of thought.