Now, since in the received theories the accumulated “productive goods” are conceived to be the most consequential factor in industry, and therefore in the community’s material welfare and in the fortunes of individuals, it logically follows that the discretionary ownership of them has come to be accounted the most important relation in which men may stand to the production of wealth and to the community’s livelihood; and the pecuniary transactions whereby this ownership is arranged, manipulated and redistributed are held to be industrially the most productive of all human activities. It is only during the nineteenth century that this doctrine of pecuniary productivity has been worked out into finished shape and has found secure lodgment in the systematic structure of economic theory--in the current theory of “the Function of the Entrepreneur;”[115] but it is also only during this period that business enterprise (pecuniary management) has come to dominate the economic situation in a substantially unmitigated degree, so that the material fortunes of the community have come to depend on these pecuniary negotiations into which its “captains of industry” enter for their own gain.[116] In the sense that no other line of activity stands in anything like an equally decisive relation of initiative or discretion to the industrial process, or bears with a like weight on the material welfare of the community, these business negotiations in ownership are unquestionably the prime factor in modern industry. But that such is the case is due to the peculiar institutions of modern times and to the peculiar current state of the industrial arts; and the former of these peculiar circumstances is conditioned by the latter. * * * * * It is not practicable to assign a hard and fast date from which this modern era began, with its peculiar scheme of economic life and the economic conceptions that characterise it. The date will vary from one country to another, and even from one industrial class to another within the same country. But it can be said that historically the modern era begins with the rise of handicraft; it is along the line of growth marked out by the development of handicraft that the modern technology has emerged, together with that industrial organisation and those pecuniary conceptions of economic efficiency and serviceability that have gradually come to their current state of maturity on the ground afforded by this technology. What historically lies back of the era of handicraft is not of a piece with the economic situation of modern times; nor is it characteristic of the Western civilisation, as contrasted with the agricultural and predatory civilisations of antiquity.