life, therefore, the greater, other things equal, will be the rate of advance in the technological mastery of mechanical facts. But much else goes to the make-up of use and wont besides the routine of industry and the utilisation of those mechanical processes and that output of goods which the modern machine industry places at men’s disposal. To put the same thing in terms already employed in another connection, the sense of workmanship is still subject to contamination with other impulsive elements of human nature working under the constraining limitations imposed by divers conventional canons and principles of conduct; besides being constantly subject to self-contamination in the way of an anthropomorphic interpretation that construes the facts of experience in terms of a craftsmanlike bent. As bearing on the effectual reach of this self-contamination of the sense of workmanship it is pertinent to recall that craftsmanship ran within a class, and so had the benefit of that accentuated sentiment of self-complacency that comes of class consciousness. From its beginnings down to the period of its dissolution the handicraft industry is an affair of the lower classes; and, as is well known, class feeling runs strong throughout the era, particularly through the centuries of its best development. Whether their conceit is wholly a naïve self-complacency or partly a product of affectation, the sentiment is well in evidence and marks the attitude of the handicraft community with a characteristic bias. The craftsmen habitually rate themselves as serviceable members of the community and contrast themselves in this respect with the other orders of society who are not occupied with the production of things serviceable for human use. To the creative workman who makes things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a merit of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the type and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. The other orders of society and other employments of time and effort may of course be well enough in their way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to himself and his work. And so good a case does the craftsman make out on this head, and so convincingly evident is the efficiency of the skilled workman, and so patent is his primacy in the industrial community, that by the close of the era much the same view has been accepted by all orders of society.