Within the region of the Western Civilisation, both in north Europe and repeatedly in the Ægean, the course of events has fallen out in the line of the latter alternative; the growth of institutions has shifted from the footing of prowess to that of prescriptive ownership. So soon as this shift has securely been made, the development of trade, industry and a technological system has come into the foreground, and these habitual interests have then reacted on the character of the institutions in force, thereby accelerating the growth of conditions favourable to their own further advance. There is, of course, no marked point of conjuncture in the cultural sequence at which this transition may definitely be said to have been effected, but in a general way it may be held that the point of transition has been passed so soon as the current political and economic speculations uncritically give precedence to the “commonweal” as against the fiscal interests of the crown or the “state,” whereby the crown and its officers come, in theory and public pronouncement, to be rated as guardians of the community’s material welfare rather than autocratic exploiters of the community’s productive capacity. Roughly from the same period there will duly set in something of an acceleration in rate of improvement in the state of the mechanic arts. This movement seems plainly to come on the initiative of the lower or industrial classes and to be carried by their genius, rather than by that of the ruling classes, whether secular or spiritual. It shows itself, typically, in a growth of handicraft and petty trade. So the sense of workmanship and its associated sentiments again come, by insensible degrees, to take the first place among the factors that determine the run of habituation and therefore the character of the resulting culture,--so making the transition from barbarism to civilisation, in the narrower sense of the term; which is accordingly to be characterised, in contrast with the predatory barbarian culture, as a qualified or mitigated (sophisticated) return to the spirit of savagery, or at least as a spiritual reversion looking in that direction, though by no means abruptly reaching the savage plane. The new phase has this in common with the typical savage culture that workmanship rather than prowess again becomes the chief or primary norm of habituation, and therefore of the growth of institutions; and that there results, therefore, a peaceable bent in the ideals and endeavours of the community. But it is workmanship combined and compounded with ownership; that is to say workmanship coupled with an invidious emulation and consequently with a system of institutions embodying a range of prescriptive differential benefits. _II. The Competitive System_