So, _e. g._, in England, say from the sixteenth century onward, there are improvements in highways and waterways and in the drainage of agricultural lands; and, as an instance more obviously related to the machine industry as commonly apprehended, there comes early in the eighteenth century the “horse-hoing cultivation” on which Jethro Tull spent his enthusiasm. Along with this obviously mechanical line of endeavour and innovation is also to be noted the deliberate efforts to improve the races of sheep and cattle that were in progress about the same time. These are perhaps not to be rated as mechanical inventions in the simple and obvious sense of the phrase, but they have this trait in common with the inventions of the machine era that they turn ascertained facts of brute nature to account for human use by a logic that has much of that character of impersonal incidence that marks the machine technology. The machine industry comes on gradually; its initial stages are visible in the early eighteenth century, but it is only toward the close of that century that its effects on the industrial system become so pronounced that the era of the machine technology may fairly be said to have set in; and it is only in Great Britain that it can be said to prevail at that period. Of the other features above alluded to as characteristic of this period of history none are of so substantial a character or so distinctive of this particular period as its technological peculiarities. Free competition, _e. g._, belongs as much to the era of handicraft as to that of the machine, having prevailed--more extensively in theory than in practice--under the former régime as under the latter; and in point of fact it gradually falls under increasing restrictions as the machine age advances, until in the more highly developed phases of the current situation it has largely ceased to be a practicable line of policy in industrial business. So, also, Capitalism did not take its rise coincident with the industrial revolution, although its best development and largest expansion may lie within the machine age. It had its beginnings in the prosperous days of handicraft, and one capitalistic era had already run its course, on the Continent, before the machine industry came in. The “credit economy,” associated with the capitalistic management of industry, is also of older growth, so far as regards the days of its early vigour, although the larger and more far-reaching developments of credit come effectually into play only in the later decades of the machine age. Much the same is true of the so-called large-scale organisation of industry and the factory system. Its highest development comes with the advanced stages of the machine technology and is manifestly conditioned by the latter, but it was already a force to be counted with at the time of the industrial revolution. The large-scale industry contemplated, with a degree of