A fact of some incisive effect in this connection is doubtless the characteristic trait of handicraft that, in its early phases wholly and obviously and in its later development also somewhat evidently, it was the affair of a class; whereas in the savage communities with which it is here compared, the technology and the livelihood in question are those of the community at large, not of a class that stands in contrast and in some degree of competition with the community at large. The craftsmen were a fraction of the community by work for whose needs they got their livelihood, even though, in the course of time, they became the dominant element within the local community (municipality) whose fortunes they shared. And as between this fraction of the population and outside classes with whom they carried on their traffic, particularly the well-to-do and land-holding classes, there could be no constraining sense of a solidarity of interest. The ancient bond of master and servant had been broken by something like an overt act of class secession on the part of the craftsmen, and nothing like a bond of fellowship had taken its place. The fellowship ran within the lines of craftsmanship, while the traffic of each craftsman typically ran across the line that divided the craftsman from the old order and population outside of this industrial system. That the eighteenth-century system of Natural Rights shows such a degree of approximation to the scheme of rights and obligations observed among many primitive peoples need flutter no one’s sense of cultural consistency. Return to Nature was more or less of a password in the closing period of the era of handicraft and after, and in respect of this system of civil relations it appears that the popular attitude of that time was in effect something of a reversion to primitive habits of thought; though it was at best a partial return to a “state of nature” in the sense of a state of peace and industry rather than a return to the unsophisticated beginnings of society. That such a partial reversion takes effect in the habits of thought of the time appears to be due to a similarly partial return to somewhat analogous habits of life. The correspondence in the habits of thought is no greater than that in the habits of life out of which these habits of thought emerged. The primitive peoples that show this suggestive resemblance to the system of Natural Rights typically are living under a routine of workmanship and in a state of habitual peace,--in these respects being placed somewhat similarly to the handicraft community. The handicraft system comes true to the same characterisation in so far that it was dominated by a routine of workmanship and so far as, in effect, its life-history falls in an era of prevailingly peaceable conditions; and such a characterisation holds true of the industrial community proper through the period during which handicraft is the ruling factor in the community’s habitual range of interest.