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 deliberate application, 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. But an 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 as it 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 apprenticeship through 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 working craftsmen. 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.