This Oriental inability to compete with Western industry arose not merely from methods of production but also from other factors such as the mentality of the workers and the scarcity of capital. Throughout the Near and Middle East economic life rested on the principle of status. The Western economic principles of contract and competition were virtually unknown. Agriculturalists and artisans followed blindly in the footsteps of their fathers. There was no competition, no stimulus for improvement, no change in customary wages, no desire for a better and more comfortable living. The industries were stereotyped; the apprentice merely imitated his master, and rarely thought of introducing new implements or new methods of manufacture. Instead of working for profit and advancement, men followed an hereditary "calling," usually hallowed by religious sanctions, handed down from father to son through many generations, each calling possessing its own unchanging ideals, its zealously guarded craft-secrets. The few bolder, more enterprising spirits who might have ventured to break the iron bands of custom and tradition were estopped by lack of capital. Fluid "investment" capital, easily mobilized and ready to pour into an enterprise of demonstrable utility and profit, simply did not exist. To the Oriental, whether prince or peasant, money was regarded, not as a source of profit or a medium of exchange, but as a store of value, to be hoarded intact against a "rainy day." The East has been known for ages as a "sink of the precious metals." In India alone, the value of the gold, silver, and jewels hidden in strong-boxes, buried in the earth, or hanging about the necks of women must run into billions. Says a recent writer on India: "I had the privilege of being taken through the treasure-vaults of one of the wealthiest Maharajahs. I could have plunged my arm to the shoulder in great silver caskets filled with diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies. The walls were studded with hooks and on each pair of hooks rested gold bars three to four feet long and two inches across. I stood by a great cask of diamonds, and picking up a handful let them drop slowly from between my fingers, sparkling and glistening like drops of water in sunlight. There are some seven hundred native states, and the rulers of every one has his treasure-vaults on a more or less elaborate scale. Besides these, every zamindar and every Indian of high or low degree who can save anything, wants to have it by him in actual metal; he distrusts this new-fangled paper currency that they try to pass off on him. Sometimes he beats his coins into bangles for his wives, and sometimes he hides money behind a loose brick or under a flat stone in the bottom of the oven, or he goes out and digs a little hole and buries it."[206]