been directed wholly to regulating industry into consonance with the antiquated scheme of business principles, rather than to take thought of how best to conduct industrial affairs and the distribution of livelihood in consonance with the technological requirements of the machine industry. It is true, among the workmen, and particularly among those skilled workmen who have been trained in the machine technology and are exposed to the full impact of the machine’s discipline, uncritical habitual faith in this institutional scheme is beginning to crumble, so far as regards that principle of Natural Rights that vests unlimited discretion in the owner of property, and so far as regards property in the material equipment of industry. But this is about as broad a proposition of such a kind as current facts of opinion and agitation will bear out, and this inchoate break with the received habitual views touching the dues and obligations of discretion in industrial matters is extremely vague and almost wholly negative. Even in those members of the community who are most directly and rigorously exposed to its discipline the machine process has hitherto wrought no such definite bias, no such positive habitual attitude of workmanlike initiative towards the conventions of industrial management as to result in a constructive deviation from the received principles.[151] On the other hand the business principles engendered by the habit of mind that gave rise to the system of Natural Rights has had grave consequences for workmanship under the conditions imposed by the machine industry. As has been shown in some detail in the foregoing chapter, the individualistic organisation of the work, coupled with the personal incidence of the handicraft technology, and the stress thrown on price rating and self-help by the ever increasing recourse to bargain and sale (“free contract”) under that system, led in the end to the habitual rating of workmanship in terms of the price it would bring. Then as always workmanlike efficiency commanded the approval of thoughtful men, as being serviceable to the common good and as a substantial manifestation of human excellence; and at the same time, then as ever, efficient work was a source of comfort and complacency to the workman. But under the teaching of the price system efficiency came to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain.