The source from which the new line of businessmen drew the accumulations of wealth by force of which they were enabled to do business is somewhat in dispute; but however interesting a question that may be in its own right, it does not particularly concern the present inquiry, and the like is true for the still more interesting and spectacular phenomena that marked the growth and decline of that early business era that ran its course within the life-history of the handicraft system.[117] Throughout that great period of business activity on the continent of Europe that gathered head in the sixteenth century and that closed in decay and collapse in the seventeenth, the principles (habits of thought) which underlay, authenticated and animated the business community and its pecuniary traffic continued to be much the same as animated the body of craftsmen in their pecuniary relations from the beginning of the era of handicraft to its close. Such, in its turn, was also the case with the later business era that set in with the great industrial advance of England in the Eighteenth Century, and such continued to be the case through the greater part of its life-history in the Nineteenth Century. Of the latterday and latest developments in business practice and principles the like cannot unhesitatingly be said, but this too is a matter that does not immediately concern the inquiry at this point. But the principles of the new and larger business were the same as had been slowly worked out under the system of petty trade. These business principles have proved to be very tenacious and stable, even in the face of apparently adverse technological circumstances, coming as they do out of a long and rigorous habituation of very wide sweep and having acquired the authenticity due to formal recognition in legal decisions and to the painstaking definition given them in the course of a protracted and exacting struggle against the institutional remnants of the feudal system. These circumstances attending the genesis and growth of modern business principles have led to their being formulated in a well-defined conceptual scheme of customary right and also to their embodiment in statutory form. To this, perhaps, they owe much of their tenacious resistance to latterday exigencies that have tended to modify or abrogate them. In their elements, of course, these business principles are even older than the era of handicraft, being substantially of the same nature as that sentimental impulse to self-aggrandisement that lies at the root of the predatory culture and so makes the substantial core of all pecuniary civilisations.