What adds further force to this position of affair is the fact that in many of the crafts the work could no longer be carried on to full advantage in strict severalty; the best approved processes required a gang or corps of workmen in coöperation, and required also something in the way of a “plant” suitable for the employment of such a corps rather than of a single individual. Such a condition, of course, came on earlier and more urgently in some crafts, as, e. g., in tanning, or brewing, or some of the metal-working trades, than in others, as, e. g., the building trades, locksmithing, cobbling, etc. But an advance of this kind, and the exigencies which such an advance brings, came on gradually and with such a measure of general prevalence through the crafts that the general statement made above may fairly stand as a free characterisation of the state of the industrial arts in the crafts at large at the period in question. The growing resort to working methods requiring organised groups of workmen together with something in the way of collective industrial plant would greatly hasten the concentration of the ownership of the material equipment. Ownership in all ages is individual ownership; and then as ever any single item of property, such as a workshop and its appliances, would presently fall into the possession of an individual owner. The owners of the plant became employers of their impecunious fellow craftsmen and so came into a position to dispose of their working capacity and their product. When and in so far as the advanced state of the industrial arts, therefore, made it impracticable for the individual craftsman readily to acquire the material means for work in his craft, any proficiency in the craft would be of no effect except by arrangement with some one who could supply these material means. The possession of the material equipment, therefore, placed in the discretion of its owners the utilisation of such technological knowledge and skill as the members of the given crafts might possess. The usufruct of the handicraft community’s technological proficiency in this way came to vest in the owners of the plant, in the same measure as this plant was necessary to the pursuit of industry under the technological scheme then in force. This effect would be had so soon and in such measure as it became a matter of appreciable difficulty to acquire and maintain the material equipment requisite to the workmanlike pursuit of industry; and it would become generally decisive of the relation between master and workman so soon as the outfit of material means required for effective work had grown larger than the common run of workmen could acquire in the course of such training as would fit them to do the work in the particular branch of industry in which they engaged.