Business enterprise came in the course of time to take over the affairs of industry and so to withdraw these affairs from the tutelage of the gilds. This shifting of the effectual discretion in the management of industrial affairs came on gradually and in varying fashion and degree over a considerable interval of time. But the decisive general circumstance that enforced this move into the modern way of doing was an advance in the scope and method of workmanship.[120] What threw the fortunes of the industrial community into the hands of the owners of accumulated wealth was essentially a technological change, or rather a complex of technological changes, which so enlarged the requirements in respect of material equipment that the impecunious workmen could no longer carry on their trade except by a working arrangement with the owners of this equipment; whereby the discretionary control of industry was shifted from the craftsmen’s technological mastery of the ways of industry to the owner’s pecuniary mastery of the material means. In the change that so took place to a larger technological scale much was doubtless due to the extension of trade, itself in great part an outcome of technological changes, directly and indirectly. For the craftsmen and their work the outcome was that recourse must be had to the material equipment owned by those who owned it, and on such terms as would content the owners; whereby the usufruct of the workmen’s proficiency and of the state of the industrial arts fell to the owners of the material equipment, on such terms as might be had.[121] So it fell to these owners of the material means and of the products of industry to turn this technological situation to account for their own gain, with as little abatement as might be, and at the same time it became incumbent on them each and several competitively to divert as large a share of the community’s productive efficiency to his own profit as the circumstances would permit. CHAPTER VI THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT[122]