The distinguishing mark of any business era, as contrasted with the handicraft economy, is the supreme dominance of pecuniary principles, both as standards of efficiency and as canons of conduct. In such a businesslike community efficiency is rated in terms of pecuniary gain; and in so far as business principles rule, efficiency in any other direction than business traffic can claim recognition only in the measure in which it may be reduced to terms of pecuniary gain. Workmanship, therefore, comes to be rated in terms of salesmanship. And the canons of workmanship, and even of technological efficiency, fall more and more into pecuniary lines and allow pecuniary tests to decide on points of serviceability. The instinct of workmanship is accordingly contaminated with ideals of self-aggrandisement and the canons of invidious emulation, so that even the serviceability of any given action or policy for the common good comes to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain which such conduct will bring to its author. Any pecuniary strategist--“captain of industry”--who manages to engross appreciably more than an even share of the community’s wealth is therefore likely to be rated as a benefactor of the community at large and an exemplar of the social virtues; whereas the man who works and does not manage to divert something more from the aggregate product to his own use than what one man’s work may contribute to it is visited not only with dispraise for having fallen short of a decent measure of efficiency but also with moral reprobation for shiftlessness and wasted opportunities. So also, to the current common sense in a community trained to pecuniary rather than to workmanlike discrimination between articles of use, those articles which serve their material use in a conspicuously wasteful manner commend themselves as more serviceable, nobler and more beautiful than such goods as do not embody such a margin of waste.[118] Under this system of business principles, in one way and another, the sense of workmanship is contaminated in all its ramifications by preconceptions of pecuniary merit and invidious distinction. But what is here immediately in question is its deflection into the channels of gainful business, together with the more obvious consequences that follow directly from the substitution of differential gain in the place of material serviceability as the end to which the instinctive propensity of workmanship so comes to drive men’s ideals and efforts under the discipline of the pecuniary culture. * * * * *