The handicraft system was an organised and regulated system of workmanship and self-help; and under the conditions imposed by its technology proficiency in the latter respect was no less indispensable and no less to the purpose than in the former. Both counted equally and in combination toward the successful working of the system, which is a practicable plan of economic life only so long as the craftsmen combine both of these capacities in good force and only so long as the technological exigencies admit the exercise of both in conjunction. The system broke down so soon as the state of the industrial arts no longer enabled the workmen to acquire the necessary technological proficiency and do the required work at the same time that they each and several were able to oversee and pursue their individual pecuniary interests. With the coming on of a wider and more extensively differentiated technological scheme, and with wider and remoter market relations, due in the main to increased facilities of transportation, these necessary conditions of a practicable handicraft economy gradually failed, and the practice of industrial investments and the larger commerce then gradually supplanted it. The discipline of everyday life under the handicraft economy was a discipline in pecuniary self-help as well as in workmanship. In the popular ideal as well as in point of practical fact the complete craftsman stood shrewdly on his individual proficiency in maintaining his own pecuniary advantage, as well as on his trained workmanship; and the gilds were organised to maintain the craft’s advantages in the market, as well as to regulate the quality of the output. The craft rules governing the quality of the output of goods were in the main enforced with a view to the maintenance of price, and so with a view to securing an adequate livelihood for the craftsmen. Efficiency in the crafts came in this way presently to be counted very much as the modern “efficiency engineers” would count it,--proximately in terms of mechanical performance, ultimately in terms of price, and more particularly in terms of net gain. So that the habits of life ingrained in the gildsman, and in the community at large where the gild system prevailed, comprised as a main fact a meticulous regard for details of ownership and for pecuniary claims and obligations. It is out of this insistent, pervasive, and minutely concrete discipline in the practice and logic of pecuniary detail that there have arisen those “natural rights” of property and those “business principles” that have been taken over by the later era of the machine industry and capitalistic investment.