When this business situation collapsed, therefore, as already spoken of above, the handicraft industry at its best was organised on capitalistic lines and managed for capitalistic ends,--with a view to profits on investment, not primarily with a view to the livelihood of the working craftsmen. The new situation which then presented itself, as a consequence of the collapse of the business community, was industrially and commercially better suited to the simpler and ruder methods of handicraft that had succeeded in the early days of the system; but the current preconceptions and trade relations that actually ruled at the time were of a capitalistic kind, and the current state of the industrial arts, even where industry had fallen into a fragmentary state, was such as technologically required the large-scale organisation in order to its due working. Between the impossibility of going forward on the accustomed lines and the impracticability of an effectual rehabilitation of more primitive methods, there resulted a period of poverty and confusion, helped out by the continued mismanagement of the dynastic politicians; so that the industrial situation of the Continent never recovered until it was overtaken by the new era of the machine industry inaugurated by the English. * * * * * The circumstances of life for the common man underwent more than one substantial change during the era of handicraft, and these changes were not all in the same sense. The dominant note changes from workmanship in the earlier phases of the era to pecuniary competition and political anxiety toward the close, particularly as regards the industrial communities of the Continent. The era is a long period of history, all told, running over some five or six centuries, from an advanced stage of the feudal age to the eighteenth century, or to various earlier dates in those countries where the handicraft system came to a provisional close in the era of statemaking; and the discipline of life does not run to the same effect in the earlier of these phases of the development as in the later. Not that handicraft ceased to be the prevailing method in the mechanical industries of these countries when the reaction overtook them, but the technological advance had been seriously checked, and such handicraft industry as still went on had ceased to dominate the economic situation and no longer held the primacy among the factors that shaped the life of the communities in question. Its place as a dominant force was taken by the new political interests and by such commercial enterprise as still went on.