From near the beginnings of the handicraft system, and throughout the period of its flourishing, the output of the industry was habitually sold at a price, in terms of money. In the earlier days the price was regulated on the basis of labour cost, on the principle that a competent craftsman must be allowed a fair livelihood, and much thought and management was spent on the determination and maintenance of such a “just price.” But in the course of generations, with further development of trade and markets, this conception of price by degrees gave way to or passed over into the modern presumption that any article of value is worth what it will bring; until, when the era of handicraft and petty trade merges in the late-modern régime of investment and machine industry, it has become the central principle of pecuniary relations that price is a matter to be arranged freely between buyer and seller on the basis of bargain and sale. The characteristic traits of this era are the handicraft industry and the petty trade which handled the output of that industry, with the trade gradually coming into a position of discretionary management, and even dominating the industry of the craftsmen to such an extent that by the date when the technology of handicraft begins to give way to the factory organisation and the machine industry the workmen are already somewhat fully under the control of the businessmen. Visibly, the ruling cause of this change in the relations between the craftsmen on the one hand and the traders and master-employers on the other hand was the increasing magnitude of the material means necessary to the pursuit of industry, due to such a growth of technology as required an ever larger, more finished and more costly complement of appliances. So that in the course of the era of handicraft the ancient relation between owners and workmen gradually re-established itself within the framework of the new technology; with the difference that the owners in whose hands the discretion now lay, and to whose gain the net output of industry now inured, were the businessmen, investors, the owners of the industrial plant and of the apparatus of trade, instead of as formerly the owners of the soil. * * * * * Under the handicraft system, and to the extent to which that system shaped the situation, the instinct of workmanship again came into a dominant position among the factors that made up the discipline of daily life and so gave their characteristic bent to men’s habits of thought. In the technology of handicraft the central fact is always the individual workman, whether in the crafts proper or in the petty trade. In that era industry is conceived in terms of the skill, initiative and application of the trained individual, and human relations outside of the workshop tend also by force of habit to be conceived in similar terms of self-sufficient individuals, each working out his own ends in severalty.