They were centres of devout heresy. It is only in late modern times that the malady has progressed so far that it may fairly be called a degree of apostacy. This concomitance between technological mastery and religious dissent is doubtless susceptible of a good and serviceable explanation at the hands of the religious experts; it is here cited without prejudice as having at least a negative bearing on the question of how the discipline of the handicraft industry may be conceived to affect men’s spiritual attitude in a field so remote as that of the life of faith.[131] * * * * * What is known to economic history as the era of handicraft is for the purposes of the political historian spoken of as the era of statemaking. The two designations may not cover precisely the same interval, but they coincide in a general way in point of dates, and the phenomena which have given rise to the two designations have much more than an accidental connection. It is not simply that the development of handicraft happens to fall in the same general period of history that is characterised by the dynastic wars that went to the making of the larger states. The growth of handicraft had much to do with making the large states practicable and with supplying the material means of large-scale warfare; while the traffic of dynastic politics in that time had in its turn very much to do with bringing that era of industrial and commercial enterprise to an inglorious close. The new industry supplied the sinews of war, and the wars ate up the substance of the industrial community. The new industry gave rise to a growth of industrial towns and commercial centres, primarily occupied by the traffic of the itinerant traders. One of the immediate consequences of this extension of merchandising enterprise was the improvement of means of communication, both in the way of an extension and improvement of shipping--itself a technological fact--and in the way of improved routes of communication. A secondary consequence was a growth of population, coupled with its concentration in urban centres, together with a growth of wealth, in good part drawn together in the same centres. These changes enabled the powers in control to extend an effectual coercion over larger distances and over larger aggregations of population and wealth; it became practicable, mechanically, to swing a larger political aggregation and to hold it together in closer coördination than before. The physical conditions requisite to the formation and enduring maintenance of large political organisations were in this way supplied by the new industrial era as an incidental result of its technological efficiency.