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 of jus 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 the jus gentium and the jus naturale of 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 vogue of 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 of jus naturale to 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 capitularies of 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 the jus naturale does 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 Rights of 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 logically be 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 any urgent 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 that time 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.
CHAPTER VII
The Machine Industry
The era of the machine industry has been designated variously, to answer to the varying point of view from which it has been considered by divers writers. As an historical era it shows divers traits, more or less characteristic, and it has been designated by one or another of these traits according to the particular line of interest that may have directed the attention of those who have had occasion to name it. It is spoken of as the era of the factory system, of large-scale industry, as the age of Capitalism or of free competition, or again as an era of the credit economy. But as seen from the point of view of technology, and more specifically from that of workmanship as it underlies the technological system, it is best characterised as the era of the machine industry, or of the machine process. As a technological period it is commonly conceived to take its rise in the British industrial community about the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the conventional date of the Industrial Revolution,—those who have a taste for precise dates assigning it more specifically to the sixties of that century, to coincide with the earliest practical use of certain large mechanical inventions of that age.[138]
Such a precise date is scarcely serviceable for any other than a mnemonic purpose. If the matter is taken in historical perspective the era of the machine process will be seen to have been coming on in England through the earlier years of the century, and even from before that time; whereas notable mechanical inventions, and engineering exploits of the like general bearing in technology, had begun to affect the industrial situation in some of the Continental countries at an appreciably earlier period. So, e. g., practical improvements had gone into effect in water-wheels, pumps and wind mills, in the use of sails and the designs of shipping, in wheeled vehicles (though the early modern improvements in this particular may easily be over-rated) and in such appliances as chimneys; and, again, there is the peculiar but highly instructive field of applied mechanics represented by the invention and improvement of firearms. Such engineering enterprises as the drainage systems of Holland also belong here and are to be counted among the notable achievements in applied mechanics.