Such a fashion of conceiving the operations and appliances of industry seems at the same time to fall in closely with men’s natural bent as given by the native instinct of workmanship; and fostered by the consistent drift of daily routine under the handicraft system this attitude grew into matter of course, and has continued to direct men’s thinking on industrial matters even long after the era of handicraft has passed and given place to the factory system and the large machine industry. So much so that throughout the nineteenth century, in economic speculations as well as in popular speech, the mechanical plant employed in industry has habitually been spoken of as “labour saving devices;” even such palpable departures from the manual workmanship of handicraft as the power loom, the smelting furnace, artificial waterways and highways, the steam engine and telegraphic apparatus, have been so classed. There need be no question but that these phenomena of the machine era will bear such an interpretation; the point of interest here is that such an interpretation should have been resorted to and should have commended itself as adequate and satisfactory when applied to these mechanical facts whose effective place in technology and in its bearing on the economy of human life has turned out to be so widely different from that range of manual operations with which it is so sought to assimilate them.[124] The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an habitual apprehension of mechanical forces and processes in terms of manual workmanship,--muscular force and craftsmanlike manipulation. This discipline touches first, and most intimately and coercively, the classes engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also necessarily pervades the community at large and gathers in its net all individuals and classes who have to do with the facts of industry, near or remote. It gives its specific character to the habits of life of the community that lives under its dispensation and by its means, and so it acts as an overruling formative guide in shaping the current habits of thought.