More direct and obvious, though of no graver importance, is the contribution made by the new technology to the means of coercion placed at the disposal of the warlords, in the way of improved weapons and armour, defences and warlike appliances. The improvements worked out in the means of warfare during the early half of the era of handicraft exceed in material effect and in boldness of conception all the traceable improvements wrought in that line by all the warlike peoples of classical antiquity and all the fighting aggregations of Asia and Africa, from the beginning of the bronze age down to modern times. The craftsmen spent their best endeavours and their most brilliant ingenuity on this production of arms and munitions, with the result that these articles still lie over in the modern collections as the most finished productions of workmanship which that era has to show. The (unintended) result at large was that these improved appliances enabled the warlords and their fighting men to control the industrial classes for their own ends and to levy exactions on trade and industry up to the limit of what the traffic would bear, or perhaps more commonly somewhat over that limit. It was, in this way, their own technological mastery that furnished the means of their own undoing, directly (mechanically speaking) and indirectly (in the resulting growth of warlike sentiment). That the craftsmen went so diligently into this production of ways and means for their own discomfort and abiding defeat is due not to any innately perverse bent of the sense of workmanship as it comes to expression in the spirit of the handicraft community, but rather to the exigencies created by the price system, with its principles of self-help,--a secondary, conventional product of the handicraft industry. As has been noted already, with perhaps tedious iteration, there runs through the handicraft community a high-wrought spirit of individual self-sufficiency. So soon as the petty trade has grown to effective dimensions the individual workman comes into somewhat direct relations with the market, and except for the collective interest and action embodied in the gild organisations the craftsmen stand in little else than a pecuniary relation to one another and bear little else than a pecuniary responsibility to their fellow craftsmen or to the community. It is the place of each to gain a livelihood by honest work through his own individual skill and enterprise. Notoriously, the craftsmen were in effect lacking in that sense of solidarity that makes an efficient organisation for defence or offence; concerted action, outside the regulative activity of the gild, was to be had only with extreme difficulty on any other basis than individual pecuniary advantage. Each worked for himself, with an eye steadily to the main chance. And the main chance, from an early date in this era, meant gain in terms of price. So the craftsman worked for such customers as would