With the transition from a naïvely predatory scheme to a commercial one, the “competitive system” takes the place of the coercive methods previously employed, and pecuniary gain becomes the incentive to industry. At least superficially, or ephemerally, the workman’s income under this pecuniary régime is in some proportion to his product. Hence there results a voluntary application to steady work and an inclination to find and to employ improvements in the methods and appliances of industry. At the same time commercial conceptions come progressively to supplant conceptions of status and personal consequence as the primary and most familiar among the habits of thought entailed by the routine of daily life. This will be true especially for the common man, as contrasted with the aristocratic classes, although it is not to be overlooked that the standards of propriety imposed on the community by the better classes will have a considerably corrective effect on the frame of mind of the common man in this respect as in others, and so will act to maintain an effective currency of predatory ideals and preconceptions after the economic situation at large has taken on a good deal of a commercial complexion. The accountancy of price and ownership throws personal prestige and consequence notably less into the foreground than does the rating in terms of prowess and gentle birth that characterises the predatory scheme of life. And in proportion as such pecuniary accountancy comes to pervade men’s relations, correspondingly impersonal terms of rating and appreciation will make their way also throughout men’s habitual apprehension of external facts, giving the whole an increasingly impersonal complexion. So far as this effect is had, the facts of observation will lend themselves with correspondingly increased facility and effect to the purposes of technology. So that the commercial phase of culture should be favourable to advance in the industrial arts, at least as regards the immediate incidence of its discipline. CHAPTER V OWNERSHIP AND THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM _I. Peaceable Ownership_