It is not that the era of handicraft was an era of reversion to savagery, but only that the tone-giving factor in the community of that time reverted, by force of the state of the industrial arts, to habits of peace and industry, in which direct and detailed manual work takes a leading place. There is also the further point of economic contact with the savage state that in the handicraft community distinctions of wealth are neither large nor of decisive consequence during the long period of habituation that brought the preconceptions of that era into the settled shape that gave them the character of a finished and balanced system of principles. It may be added, at the risk of tedious repetition, that the habits of life characteristic of the era, as well as the frame of mind suited to this characteristic routine of life, seem peculiarly suited to the native endowment of the European peoples,--perhaps in an especial degree suited to the native bent of those sections of the population in which there is an appreciable admixture of the dolicho-blond stock. That such may be the case is at least strongly suggested by the tenacious hold which this system of Rights apparently still has on the sentimental allegiance of these Western peoples, after the conditions to which these Rights owe their rise, and to which they are suited, have in the main ceased to exist; as well as by the somewhat blind fervour with which these peoples, and more especially the English-speaking section of them, go about the idyllic enterprise of rehabilitating that obsolescent “competitive system” that embodied the system of Natural Rights, and that came up with the era of handicraft and went under in its dissolution. CHAPTER VII THE MACHINE INDUSTRY The era of the machine industry has been designated variously, to answer to the varying point of view from which it has been considered by divers writers. As an historical era it shows divers traits, more or less characteristic, and it has been designated by one or another of these traits according to the particular line of interest that may have directed the attention of those who have had occasion to name it. It is spoken of as the era of the factory system, of large-scale industry, as the age of Capitalism or of free competition, or again as an era of the credit economy. But as seen from the point of view of technology, and more specifically from that of workmanship as it underlies the technological system, it is best characterised as the era of the machine industry, or of the machine process. As a technological period it is commonly conceived to take its rise in the British industrial community about the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the conventional date of the Industrial Revolution,--those who have a taste for precise dates assigning it more specifically to the sixties of that century, to coincide with the earliest practical use of certain large mechanical inventions of that age.[138]