Next followed the Low Countries, with the south German industrial centres, where again industry of the handicraft order grew great, gave rise to trade on a rapidly increasing scale, and presently to an era of business enterprise of unprecedented spirit and scope. But the age of the Fuggers closed in bankruptcy and industrial collapse when the princely wrangles of the era of statemaking had used up the resources of the industrial community and exhausted the credit of that generation of captains of industry. Here too religious contention came in for its share in the set-back of industry and commerce. In their economic outlines the two cases are very much of the same kind. Central Europe ran through much the same cycle of industrial growth, commercial enterprise, princely ambitions, dynastic wars, religious fanaticism, exhaustion and insecurity, and industrial collapse and decay,--substantially repeating, on an enlarged scale and with much added detail, the sequence that had brought South Europe into arrears. Meantime the material sciences had come forward again in the West, and flourished at the hands of the Netherlanders, South Germans and French scholars, who under the favouring discipline of this new advance in industry and commerce had slowly come abreast of the same matter-of-fact conceptions that had once made Italy the home of modern science. And here again, as before, princely politics, with the attendant war, exactions and insecurity, followed presently by religious controversies and persecutions, not only put an end to the advance of industry and business but also checked the attendant development of science nearly to a standstill. So that when a further move of the kind is presently made it is the British community that takes the lead. Great Britain had been in arrears in all those respects that make up civilisation of the Occidental kind, and not least in the material respect; until the time when the peoples of the Continent by their own act fell into the rear in respect of those material interests--technology and business enterprise--which afford the material ground out of which the Occidental type of civilisation has grown. In Great Britain the sequence of these cultural phenomena has not been substantially different, taken by and large, from that which had previously been run through by the Continental communities; except that the same outcome was not reached, apparently because the sequence was not interrupted by collapse at the same critical point in the development.