The scheme of technological insight and proficiency current in any given culture is manifestly a product of group life and is held as a common stock, and as manifestly the individual workman is helpless without access to it. It is none too broad to say that he is a workman only because and so far as he effectually shares in this common stock of technological equipment. He may be gifted in a special degree with workmanlike aptitudes, may by nature be stout or dextrous or keen-sighted or quick-witted or sagacious or industrious beyond his fellows; but with all these gifts, so long as he has assimilated none of this common stock of workmanlike knowledge he remains simply an admirable parcel of human raw material; he is of no effect in industry. With such special gifts or with special training based on this common stock an individual may stand out among his fellows as a workman of exceptional merit and value, and without the common run of workmanlike aptitudes he may come to nothing worth while as a workman even with the largest opportunities and most sedulous training. It is the two together that make the working force of the community; and in both respects, both in his inherited and in his acquired traits, the individual is a product of group life.

Using the term in a sufficiently free sense, pedigree is no less and no more requisite to the workman’s effectual equipment than the common stock of technological mastery which the community offers him. But his pedigree is a group pedigree, just as his technology is a group technology. As is sometimes said to the same effect, the individual is a creature of heredity and circumstances. And heredity is always group heredity,90 perhaps peculiarly so in the human species.

The promptings of invidious self-respect commonly lead men to evade or deny something of the breadth of their inheritance in respect of human nature. “I am not as the publican yonder,” whether I have the grace to thank God for this invidious distinction or more simply charge it to the account of my reputable ancestors in the male line. With a change of venue by which the cause is taken out of the jurisdiction of interested parties, its complexion changes. So evident is the fact of group heredity in the lower animals, for instance, that biologists have no inclination to deny its pervading force, apart from any conceivably parthenogenetic lines of descent,—and, to the inconvenience of the eugenic pharisee, parthenogenetic descent never runs in the male line, besides being of extremely rare occurrence in the human species. As a matter of course the Darwinian biologists have the habit of appealing to group heredity as the main factor in the stability of species, and they are very curious about the special circumstances of any given case in which it may appear not to be fully operative: and they have, on the other hand, even looked hopefully to fortuitous isolation of particular lines of descent as a possible factor in the differentiation and fixation of specific types, being at a loss to account for such differentiation or fixation so long as no insuperable mechanical obstacle stands in the way of persistent crossing. The like force of group heredity is visible in the characteristic differences of race. The heredity of any given race of mankind is always sufficiently homogeneous to allow all its individuals to be classed under the race. And when an individual comes to light in a fairly pure-bred community who shows physical traits that vary obviously from the common racial type of the community, the question which suggests itself to the anthropologists is not, How does this individual differ from others of the same breed? but, What is the alien strain, and how has it come in? And what is true of the physical characters of the race in this respect is only less obviously true of its spiritual traits.

In a culture where all individuals are hybrids, in point of pedigree, as is the case with all the leading peoples of Christendom, the ways of this group heredity are particularly devious, and the fortunes of the individual in this respect are in a peculiar degree exposed to the caprice of Mendelian contingencies; so that his make-up, physical and spiritual, is, humanly speaking, in the main a chapter of accidents. Where each individual draws for his hereditary traits on a wide ancestry of unstable hybrids, as all civilised men do, his chances are always those of the common lot, with some slight antecedent probability of his resembling the nearer ones among his variegated ancestry. But he has also and everywhere in this hybrid panmixis an excellent chance of being allotted something more accentuated, for good or ill, in the way of hereditary traits than anything shown by his varied assortment of ancestors. It commonly happens in such a hybrid community that in the new crossing of hybrids that takes place at every marriage, some new idiosyncracy, slight or considerable, comes to light in the offspring, beyond anything visible in the parents or the remoter pedigree; for in the crossing of what may be called multiple-hybrid parents, complementary characters that may have been dormant or recessive in the parents will come in from both sides, combine, re-enforce one another, and cumulatively give an unlooked-for result. So that in a hybrid community the fortunes of all individuals are somewhat precarious in respect of heredity.

Such are the conditions which have prevailed among the peoples of Europe since the first beginnings of that culture that has led up to the Western civilisation as known to history. In these circumstances any individual, therefore, owes to the group not only his share of that certain typical complement of traits that characterise the common run, but usually something more than is coming to him in the way of individual qualities and infirmities if he is in any way distinguishable from the common run, as well as a blind chance of transmitting almost any traits that he is not possessed of.91

In the lower cultures, where the division of labour is slight and the diversity of occupations is mainly such as marks the changes of the seasons, the common stock of technological knowledge and proficiency is not so extensive or so recondite but that the common man may compass it in some fashion, and in its essentials it is accessible to all members of the community by common notoriety, and the training required by the state of the industrial arts comes to everyone as a matter of course in the routine of daily life. The necessary material equipment of tools and appliances is slight and the acquisition of it is a simple matter that also arranges itself as an incident in the routine of daily life. Given the common run of aptitude for the industrial pursuits incumbent on the members of such a community, the material equipment needful to find a livelihood or to put forth the ordinary productive effort and turn out the ordinary industrial output can be compassed without strain by any individual in the course of his work as he goes along. The material equipment, the tools, implements, contrivances necessary and conducive to productive industry, is incidental to the day’s work; in much the same way but in a more unqualified degree than the like is true as to the technological knowledge and skill required to make use of this equipment.92

As determined by the state of the industrial arts in such a culture, the members of the community co-operate in much of their work, to the common gain and to no one’s detriment, since there is substantially no individual, or private, gain to be sought. There is substantially no bartering or hiring, though there is a recognised obligation in all members to lend a hand; and there is of course no price, as there is no property and no ownership, for the sufficient reason that the habits of life under these circumstances do not provoke such a habit of thought. Doubtless, it is a matter of course that articles of use and adornment pertain to their makers or users in an intimate and personal way; which will come to be construed into ownership when in the experience of the community an occasion for such a concept as ownership arises and persists in sufficient force to shape the current habits of thought to that effect. There is also more or less of reciprocal service and assistance, with a sufficient sense of mutuality to establish a customary scheme of claims and obligations in that respect. So also it is true that such a community holds certain lands and customary usufructs and that any trespass on these customary holdings is resented. But it would be a vicious misapprehension to read ideas and rights of ownership into these practices, although where civilised men have come to deal with instances of the kind they have commonly been unable to put any other construction on the customs governing the case; for the reason that civilised men’s relations with these peoples of the lower culture have been of a pecuniary kind and for a pecuniary purpose, and they have brought no other than pecuniary conceptions from home.93 There being little in hand worth owning and little purpose to be served by its ownership, the habits of thought which go to make the institution of ownership and property rights have not taken shape. The slight facts which would lend themselves to ownership are not of sufficient magnitude or urgency to call the institution into effect and are better handled under customs which do not yet take cognisance of property rights. Naturally, in such a cultural situation there is no appreciable accumulation of wealth and no inducement to it; the nearest approach being an accumulation of trinkets and personal belongings, among which should, at least in some cases, be included certain weapons and perhaps tools.94 These things belong to their owner or bearer in much the same sense as his name, which was not held on tenure of ownership or as a pecuniary asset before the use of trade-marks and merchantable good-will.

The workman—more typically perhaps the workwoman—in such a culture, as indeed in any other, is a “productive agent” in the manner and degree determined by the state of the industrial arts. What is obvious in this respect here holds only less visibly for any other, more complicated and technologically full-charged cultural situation, such as has come on with the growth of population and wealth among the more advanced peoples. He or she, or rather they—for there is substantially no industry carried on in strict severalty in these communities—are productive factors or industrial agents, in the sense that they will on occasion turn out a surplus above their necessary current consumption, only because and so far as the state of the industrial arts enables them to do so. As workman, labourer, producer, breadwinner, the individual is a creature of the technological scheme; which in turn is a creation of the group life of the community. Apart from the common stock of knowledge and training the individual members of the community have no industrial effect. Indeed, except by grace of this common technological equipment no individual and no family group in any of the known communities of mankind could support their own life; for in the long course of mankind’s life-history, since the human plane was first reached, the early mutants which were fit to survive in a ferine state without tools and without technology have selectively disappeared, as being unfit to survive under the conditions of domesticity imposed by so highly developed a state of the industrial arts as any of the savage cultures now extant.95 The Homo Javensis and his like are gone, because there is technologically no place for them between the anthropoids to the one side and the extant types of man on the other. And never since the brave days when Homo Javensis took up the “white man’s burden” for the better regulation of his anthropoid neighbours has the technological scheme admitted of any individual’s carrying on his life in severalty. So that industrial efficiency, whether of an individual workman or of the community at large, is a function of the state of the industrial arts.96

The simple and obvious industrial system of this archaic plan leaves the individuals, or rather the domestic groups, that make up the community, economically independent of one another and of the community at large, except that they depend on the common technological stock for the immaterial equipment by means of which to get their living. This is of course not felt by them as a relation of dependence; though there seems commonly to be some sense of indebtedness on part of the young, and of responsibility on part of the older generation, for the proper transmission of the recognised elements of technological proficiency. It is impossible to say just at what point in the growth and complication of technology this simple industrial scheme will begin to give way to new exigencies and give occasion to a new scheme of institutions governing the economic relations of men; such that the men’s powers and functions in the industrial community come to be decided on other grounds than workmanlike aptitude and special training. In the nature of things there can be no hard and fast limit to this phase of industrial organisation. Its disappearance or supersession in any culture appears always to have been brought on by the growth of property, but the institution of property need by no means come in abruptly at any determinate juncture in the sequence of technological development. So that this archaic phase of culture in which industry is organised on the ground of workmanship alone may come very extensively to overlap and blend with the succeeding phase in which property relations chiefly decide the details of the industrial organisation,—as is shown in varying detail by the known lower cultures.

The forces which may bring about such a transition are often complex and recondite, and they are seldom just the same in any given two instances. Neither the material situation nor the human raw material involved are precisely the same in all or several instances, and there is no coercively normal course of things that will constrain the growth of institutions to take a particular typical form or to follow a particular typical sequence in all cases. Yet, in a general way such a supersession of free workmanship by a pecuniary control of industry appears to have been necessarily involved in any considerable growth of culture. Indeed, at least in the economic respect, it appears to have been the most universal and most radical mutation which human culture has undergone in its advance from savagery to civilisation; and the causes of it should be of a similarly universal and intrinsic character.

It may be taken as a generalisation grounded in the instinctive endowment of mankind that the human sense of workmanship will unavoidably go on turning to account what there is in hand of technological knowledge, and so will in the course of time, by insensible gains perhaps, gradually change the technological scheme, and therefore also the scheme of customary canons of conduct answering to it; and in the absence of overmastering circumstances this sequence of change must, in a general way, set in the direction of great technological mastery. Something in the way of an “advance” in workmanlike mastery is to be looked for, in the absence of inexorable limitations of environment. The limitations may be set by the material circumstances or by circumstances of the institutional situation, but on the lower levels of culture the insurmountable obstacles to such an advance appear to have been those imposed by the material circumstances; although institutional factors have doubtless greatly retarded the advance in most cases, and may well have defeated it in many. In some of the known lower cultures such an impassable conjuncture in the affairs of technology has apparently been reached now and again, resulting in a “stationary state” of the industrial arts and of social arrangements, economic and otherwise. Such an instance of “arrested development” is afforded by the Eskimo, who have to all appearance reached the bounds of technological mastery possible in the material circumstances in which they have been placed and with the technological antecedents which they have had to go on. At the other extreme of the American continent the Fuegians and Patagonians may similarly have reached at least a provisional limit of the same nature; though such a statement is less secure in their case, owing to the scant and fragmentary character of the available evidence. So also the Bushmen, the Ainu, various representative communities of the Negrito and perhaps of the Dravidian stocks, appear to have reached a provisional limit—barring intervention from without. In these latter instances the decisive obstacles, if they are to be accepted as such, seem to lie in the human-nature of the case rather than in the material circumstances. In these latter instances the sense of workmanship, though visibly alert and active, appears to have been inadequate to carry out the technological scheme into further new ramifications for want of the requisite intellectual aptitudes,—a failure of aptitudes not in degree but in kind.

The manner in which increasing technological mastery has led over from the savage plan of free workmanship to the barbarian system of industry under pecuniary control is perhaps a hazardous topic of speculation; but the known facts of primitive culture appear to admit at least a few general propositions of a broad and provisional character. It seems reasonably safe to say that the archaic savage plan of free workmanship will commonly have persisted through the palæolithic period of technology, and indeed somewhat beyond the transition to the neolithic. This is fairly borne out by the contemporary evidence from savage cultures. In the prehistory of the north-European culture there is also reason to assume that the beginnings of a pecuniary control fall in the early half of the neolithic period.97 There seems to be no sharply definable point in the technological advance that can be said of itself to bring on this revolutionary change in the institutions governing economic life. It appears to be loosely correlated with technological improvement, so that it sets in when a sufficient ground for it is afforded by the state of the industrial arts, but what constitutes a sufficient ground can apparently not be stated in terms of the industrial arts alone. Among the early consequences of an advance in technology beyond the state of the industrial arts schematically indicated above, and coinciding roughly with the palæolithic stage, is on the one hand an appreciable resort to “indirect methods of production”, involving a systematic cultivation of the soil, domestication of plants and animals; or an appreciable equipment of industrial appliances, such as will in either case require a deliberate expenditure of labour and will give the holders of the equipment something more than a momentary advantage in the quest of a livelihood. On the other hand it leads also to an accumulation of wealth beyond the current necessaries of subsistence and beyond that slight parcel of personal effects that have no value to anyone but their savage bearer.

Hereby the technological basis for a pecuniary control of industry is given, in that the “roundabout process of production” yields an income above the subsistence of the workmen engaged in it, and the material equipment of appliances (crops, fruit-trees, live stock, mechanical contrivances) binds this roundabout process of industry to a more or less determinate place and routine, such as to make surveillance and control possible. So far as the workman under the new phase of technology is dependent for his living on the apparatus and the orderly sequence of the “roundabout process” his work may be controlled and the surplus yielded by his industry may be turned to account; it becomes worth while to own the material means of industry, and ownership of the material means in such a situation carries with it the usufruct of the community’s immaterial equipment of technological proficiency.

The substantial fact upon which the strategy of ownership converges is this usufruct of the industrial arts, and the tangible items of property to which the claims of ownership come to attach will accordingly vary from time to time, according as the state of the industrial arts will best afford an effectual exploitation of this usufruct through the tenure of one or another of the material items requisite to the pursuit of industry. The chief subject of ownership may accordingly be the cultivated trees, as in some of the South Sea islands; or the tillable land, as happens in many of the agricultural communities; or fish weirs and their location, as on some of the salmon streams of the American north-west coast; or domestic animals, as is typical of the pastoral culture; or it may be the persons of the workmen, as happens under divers circumstances both in pastoral and in agricultural communities; or, with an advance in technology of such a nature as to place the mechanical appliances of industry in a peculiarly advantageous position for engrossing the roundabout processes of production, as in the latterday machine industry, these mechanical appliances may become the typical category of industrial wealth and so come to be accounted “productive goods” in some eminent sense.

The institutional change by which a pecuniary regulation of industry comes into effect may take one form or another, but its outcome has commonly been some form of ownership of tangible goods. Particularly has that been the outcome in the course of development that has led on to those great pecuniary cultures of which Occidental civilisation is the most perfect example. But just in what form the move will be made, if at all, from free workmanship to pecuniary industry and ownership, is in good part a question of what the material situation of the community will permit. In some instances the circumstances have apparently not permitted the move to be made at all. The Eskimo culture is perhaps an extreme case of this kind. The state of the industrial arts among them has apparently gone appreciably beyond the technological juncture indicated above as critical in this respect. It involves a considerable specialisation and accumulation of appliances, such as boats, sleds, dogs, harness, various special forms of nets, harpoons and spears, and an elaborate line of minor apparatus necessary to the day’s work and embodying a minutely standardised technique. At the same time these articles of use, together with their household and personal effects, represent something appreciable in the way of portable wealth. Yet in their economic (pecuniary and industrial), domestic, social, or religious institutions the Eskimo have substantially not gone beyond the point of customary regulation commonly associated with the simpler, hand-to-mouth state of the industrial arts typical of the palæolithic savage culture. And this archaic Eskimo culture, with its highly elaborated technology, is apparently of untold antiquity; it is even believed by competent students of antiquity to have stood over without serious advance or decline since European palæolithic times—a period of not less than ten thousand years.98 The causes conditioning this “backward” type of culture among the Eskimo, coupled with a relatively advanced and extremely complete technological system, are presumed to lie in their material surroundings; which on the one hand do not permit a congestion of people within a small area or enable the organisation and control of a compact community of any considerable size; while on the other hand they exact a large degree of co-operation and common interest, on pain of extreme hardship if not of extinction.

More perplexing at first sight is the case of such sedentary agricultural communities as the Pueblo Indians, who have also not advanced very materially beyond the simpler cultural scheme of savage life, and have not taken seriously to a system of property and a pecuniary control of industry, in spite of their having achieved a very considerable advance in the industrial arts, particularly in agriculture, such as would appear to entitle them to something “higher” than that state of peaceable, non-coercive social organisation, in which they were found on their first contact with civilised men, with maternal descent and mother-goddesses, and without much property rights, accumulated wealth or pecuniary distinction of classes. Again an explanation is probably to be sought in special circumstances of environment, perhaps re-enforced by peculiarities of the racial endowment; though the latter point seems doubtful, since both linguistically and anthropometrically the Pueblos are found to belong to two or three distinct stocks, at the same time that their culture is notably uniform throughout the Pueblo region, both on the technological and on the institutional side. The peculiar material circumstances that appear to have conditioned the Pueblo culture are (a) a habitat which favours agricultural settlement only at isolated and widely separated spots, (b) sites for habitation (on detached mesas or on other difficult hills or in isolated valleys or canyons) easily secured against aggression from without and not affording notable differential advantages or admitting segregation of the population within the pueblo, (c) the absence of beasts of burden, such as have enabled the inhabitants of analogous regions of the old world effectually to cover long distances and make raiding a lucrative, or at least an attractive enterprise.

These, and other peculiar instances of what may perhaps be called cultural retardation, indicate by way of exception what may have been the ruling causes that have governed in the advance to a higher culture under more ordinary circumstances,—by “ordinary” being intended such circumstances as have apparently led to a different and, it would be held, a more normal result in the old world, and particularly in the region of the Western civilisation.

In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an advance in the industrial arts as will result in an accumulation of wealth, a considerable and efficient industrial equipment, or in a systematic and permanent cultivation of the soil or an extensive breeding of herds or flocks, will also bring on ownership and property rights bearing on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the land employed in their production. What has seemed the most natural and obvious beginnings of property rights, in the view of those economists who have taken an interest in the matter, is the storing up of valuables by such of the ancient workmen as were enabled, by efficiency, diligence or fortuitous gains, to produce somewhat more than their current consumption. There are difficulties, though perhaps not insuperable, in the way of such a genesis of property rights and pecuniary differentiation within any given community. The temper of the people bred in the ways of the simpler plan of hand-to-mouth and common interest does not readily bend itself to such an institutional innovation, even though the self-regarding impulses of particular members of the community may set in such a direction as would give the alleged result.99

There are other and more natural ways of reaching the same results, ways more consonant with that archaic scheme of usages on which the new institution of property is to be grafted. (a) In the known cultures of this simpler plan there are usually, or at least frequently, present a class of magicians (shamans, medicine men, angekut), an inchoate priestly class, who get their living in part “by their wits,” half parasitically, by some sort of tithe levied on their fellow members for supernatural ministrations and exploits of faith that are worth as much as they will bring.100 As the industrial efficiency of the community increases with the technological gain, and an increasing disposable output is at hand, it should naturally follow, human nature being what it is, that the services of the priests or magicians should suffer an advance in value and so enable the priests to lay something by, to acquire a special claim to certain parcels of land or cultivated trees or crops or first-fruits or labour to be performed by their parishioners. There is no limit to the value of such ministrations except the limit of tolerance, “what the traffic will bear.” And much may be done in this way, which is in close touch with the accustomed ways of life among known savages and lower barbarians. To the extent to which such a move is successful it will alter the economic situation of the community by making the lay members, in so far, subject to the priestly class, and will gather wealth and power in the hands of the priests; so introducing a relation of master and servant, together with class differences in wealth, the practice of exclusive ownership, and pecuniary obligations. (b) With an accumulation of wealth, whether in portable form or in the form of plantations and tillage, there comes the inducement to aggression, predation, by whatever name it may be known. Such aggression is an easy matter in the common run of lower cultures, since relations are habitually strained between these savage and barbarian communities. There is commonly a state of estrangement between them amounting to constructive feud, though the feud is apt to lie dormant under a modus vivendi so long as there is no adequate inducement to open hostilities, in the way of booty. Given a sufficiently wealthy enemy who is sufficiently ill prepared for hostilities to afford a fighting chance of taking over this wealth by way of booty or tribute, with no obvious chance of due reprisals, and the opening of hostilities will commonly arrange itself. The communities mutually concerned so pass from the more or less precarious peaceful customs and animus common to the indigent lower cultures, to a more or less habitual attitude of predatory exploit. With the advent of warfare comes the war chief, into whose hands authority and pecuniary emoluments gather somewhat in proportion as warlike exploits and ideals become habitual in the community.101 More or less of loot falls into the hands of the victors in any raid. The loot may be goods, cattle if any, or men, women and children; any or all of which may become (private) property and be accumulated in sufficient mass to make a difference between rich and poor. Captives may fall into some form of servitude, and in an agricultural community may easily become the chief item of wealth. At the same time an entire community may be reduced to servitude, so falling into the possession of an absentee owner (master), or under resident masters coming in from the victorious enemy.

In any or all of these ways the institution of ownership is likely to arise so soon as there is provocation for it, and in all cases it is a consequence of an appreciable advance in the industrial arts. Yet in a number of recorded cases a sufficient advance in technology does not appear to have been followed by so prompt an introduction of ownership, at least not in the fully developed form, as the surface facts would seem to have called for. Custom in the lower cultures is extremely tenacious, and what might seem an excessive allowance of time appears to be needed for so radical an innovation in the habitual scheme of things as is involved in the installation of rights of ownership. There are cases of a fairly advanced barbarian culture, with sufficiently coercive government control, an authoritative priesthood, and well-marked class distinctions which hold good both in economic and social relations, and yet where the line of demarcation between ownership and mastery is not drawn in any unambiguous fashion—where it is perhaps as accurate a statement as the case permits, to say that this distinction has not yet been made, and so would, if applied, mark a difference that does not yet exist.102

So long as overt predatory conditions continue to rule the case,—e. g., so long as the community in question continues, in a sense, under martial law, “in a state of seige,” where the holders of the economic advantage hold it on a tenure of prowess or by way of delegated power and prerogative from a superior of warlike antecedents and dynastic right,—so long the rights of ownership are not likely to be well differentiated from those of mastery. Much the same characterisation of such a state of things is conveyed in the current phrase that “the rights of person and property are not secure.” The very wide prevalence in the barbarian cultures of some such state of things argues that the genesis of property rights is likely to have been something of this kind in the common run, though it does not in other cases preclude a different and more peaceable development out of workmanlike or priestly economies.

But even if it should be found, when the matter has been sifted, that the genesis of ownership is of the latter kind, it would also in all probability be found that among the peoples whose institutional growth has a serious genetic bearing on the Western culture the holding of property has, late or early, passed through a phase of predatory tenure in which the distinction between ownership and mastery has so far fallen into abeyance as to have had but a slight effect on the further development. Where, as appears frequently to have been the case both in Europe and elsewhere, the kingship and temporal power has arisen out of the priestly office and spiritual power—or perhaps better where the inchoate kingship was in its origins chiefly of a priestly complexion, with a gradual shifting of kingly power and prerogative to a temporal basis,103—there the transition from a creation of property and mastery rights by priestly economies (fraud?) to a tenure of wealth and authority by royal prerogative (force?) will have so blended the two methods of genesis as to leave the attempt at a hard fast discrimination between them somewhat idle.

But whatever may be conceived to have been the genesis of ownership, the institution is commonly found, in the barbarian culture, to be tempered with a large infusion of predatory concepts, of status, prerogative, differential respect of persons and economic classes, and a corresponding differential respect of occupations. Whether property provokes to predation or predation initiates ownership, the situation that results in early phases of the pecuniary culture is much the same; and the causal relation in which this situation stands to the advance in workmanship is also much the same. This relation between workmanship and the pecuniary culture brought on with the advent of ownership is a twofold one, or, perhaps better, it is a relation of mutual give and take. The increase in industrial efficiency due to a sufficient advance in the industrial arts gives rise to the ownership of property and to pecuniary appreciations of men and things, occupations and products, habits, customs, usages, observances, services and goods. At the same time, since predation and warlike exploit are intimately associated with the facts of ownership through its early history (perhaps throughout its history), there results a marked accentuation of the self-regarding sentiments; with the economically important consequence that self-interest displaces the common good in men’s ideals and aspirations. The animus entailed by predatory exploit is one of self-interest, a seeking of one’s own advantage at the cost of the enemy, which frequently, in the poetically ideal case, takes such an extreme form as to prefer the enemy’s loss to one’s own gain. And in the emulation which the predatory life and its distinctions of wealth introduce into the community, the end of endeavour is likely to become the differential advantage of the individual as against his neighbours rather than the undifferentiated advantage of the group as a whole, in contrast with alien or hostile groups. The members of the community come to work each for his own interest in severalty, rather than for an undivided interest in the common lot. Such sentiment of group solidarity as there may remain falls also into the invidious and emulative form; whereby the fighting patriot becomes the type and exemplar of the public spirited citizen, whose ideal then is to follow his leader and humble the pride of those whom the chances of contention have thrown in with the other side of the game. The sentiment of common interest, itself in good part a diffuse working-out of the parental instinct, comes at the best to converge on the glory of the flag instead of the fulness of life of the community at large, or more commonly it comes to be centred in loyalty, that is to say in subservience, to the common war-chief and his dynastic successors.

In the shifting of activities, ideals and aims so brought in with the advent of wealth and ownership, the part of the priests and their divinities is not to be overlooked, for herein lies one of the greater cultural gains brought on by the technological advance at this juncture. The margin of service and produce available for consumption in the cult increases, and by easy consequence the spiritual prestige and the temporal power and prerogatives of the priesthood grow greater. The jurisdiction of the gods of the victors is extended; through the vicarious power of the priests, over the subject peoples, and as the temporal dominion is enlarged and an increasing measure of coercion is employed in controlling these dominions, so also in the affairs of the gods and their priests there is an accession of power and dignity. It commonly happens where predatory enterprise comes to be habitual and successful that the temporal power tends to centre in an autocratic and arbitrary ruler; and in this as in so much else, spiritual affairs are likely to take their complexion from the temporal, resulting in a strong drift toward an autocratic monotheism, which in the finished case comes to a climax in an omnipotent, omniscient deity of very exalted dignity and very exacting temper. For the habits of thought enforced in the affairs of daily life are carried over into men’s sense of what is right and good in the life of the gods as well. If there is any choice among the gods under whose auspices a people has successfully entered on a career of predation, so that some of the gods have more of a reputation for rapacity and inhumanity than others, the most atrocious among them is likely, other things being equal, to become the war-god of the conquering host, and so eventually to be exalted to the suzerainty among the gods, and even in time to become the one and only incumbent of the divine czardom.

Should it happen that a relatively humane, tolerant and tractable deity comes in for exaltation to the divine suzerainty, as well may be if such a one has already a good prior claim standing over from the more peaceable past, he will readily acquire the due princely arrogance and irresponsibility that vests the typical heavenly king. It may be added that as a matter of course no degree of imputed inhumanity in the most high God will stand in the way of a god-fearing and astute priesthood volubly ascribing to him all the good qualities that should grace an elderly patriarchal gentleman of the old school; so that even his most infamous atrocities become ineffably meritorious and are dispensed of his mercy.104

With the terrors of a jealous and almighty God behind them, and with faith in their own mission and sagacity in its administration, the priesthood are in a position to make the affairs of the heavenly king count for much in the affairs of men; more particularly since this spiritual power enters into working arrangements with the temporal power; so that in the outcome these institutions which in their origins have grown out of a precarious margin of product above subsistence come to possess themselves of the output at large and leave a precarious margin of subsistence to the community at large.105

These further matters of “natural law in the spiritual world” are not in themselves of direct interest to the present inquiry, and they are also matters of somewhat tedious commonplace. Yet this run of things has grave consequences in the further working-out of the technological situation as well as in the course of material welfare for the community on whom it is incumbent to turn the technological knowledge to account, to conserve or improve and transmit it, and for this reason it has seemed necessary summarily to recall those general features of the cultural scheme that are inherently associated with the earlier pecuniary culture,—the full-blown barbarian culture. And it seems pertinent also to add something further in the same connection before leaving this aspect of the case.

It is necessary to hark back to what was said in an earlier chapter, of the relations of tillage and cattle-breeding to the instinct of workmanship and the course of technological advance. Both the technological and the institutional bearing of cattle-breeding is particularly notable in this connection. As already spoken of in what has gone before, cattle-breeding has the technological peculiarity that it may be successfully entered on and carried forward with a larger admixture of anthropomorphic concepts than the mechanic arts, or even than the domestication and care of the crop plants. It is perhaps not to be admitted that the penchant of early man to take an anthropomorphic view of the lower animals and impute to them the common traits of human nature has directly conduced to their successful domestication, but it should be within the mark to say that this penchant may have been primarily responsible for the course of conduct that led to the domestication of animals,106 and that it has apparently never been a serious drawback to any pastoral culture. Now, wealth in flocks and herds is peculiar not only in being eminently portable, even to the extent that in the usual course of this industry it is necessary for a pastoral community to migrate, or to go over an extended itinerary with the changing seasons, but it has also the peculiar quality of multiplying spontaneously, given only a degree of surveillance and a sufficient range of pasture lands. It follows that cattle are easy and tempting to acquire by predation, will accumulate through natural increase without notable exertion on the part of their owners, and will multiply beyond the bearing capacity of any disposable range. Hence a pastoral people, or a people given in great part to pastoral pursuits, will somewhat readily take to a predatory life; will have to be organised for defence (and offence) against raids or encroachments from its neighbours engaged in the same pursuits; will find itself short of range lands through the natural increase of its flocks or herds, and so will even involuntarily be brought into feud with neighbouring herdsmen through mutual trespass. Further, the work of herding, on the scale imposed by the open continental cattle and sheep ranges, is man’s work, as is also the incidental fighting, raiding, and cattle-lifting.

The effects of these technological conditions on the general culture of a pastoral people are such as are set forth in their most favourable light in the early historical books of the Old Testament, or such conditions as may be found today on the great cattle ranges of west and north-central Asia. The community falls necessarily into a patriarchal régime; with considerable concentration of wealth in individual hands; great disparity in wealth and social standing, commonly involving both chattel slavery and serfdom; a fighting organisation under patriarchal-despotic leadership, which serves both for civil, political and religious purposes; domestic institutions of the same cast, involving a degree of subjection of women and children and commonly polygamy for the patriarchal upper or ruling class; a religious system of a monotheistic or monarchical complexion and drawn on lines of patriarchal despotism; with the priestly office vested in the patriarchal head of the community (the eldest male of the eldest male line) if the group is small enough to admit the administration of both the temporal and spiritual power at the hands of one man—as Israel at the time of the earlier sojourn in Canaan—or vested in a specialised priesthood if the group is of great size—as Israel on their return to Palestine.

Such a culture is manifestly fit to succeed both in avowedly predatory enterprise and in pecuniary enterprise of a more peaceable sort, so long as range lands are at its disposal or so long as it can find a sufficiently large and compact agricultural community to reduce to servitude, or so long as it can find ways and means of commercial enterprise while still occupying a position defensible against all comers. Its population is organised for offence and defence and trained in the habits of subordination necessary to any successful war, and the patriarchal authority and pecuniary ideals inbred in them give them facility in co-operation against aliens, as well as the due temper for successful bargaining. Such a culture has the elements of national strength and solidarity, given only some adequate means of subsistence while still retaining its militant patriarchal organisation. Not least among its elements of national strength is its religion, which fosters the national pride of a people chosen by the Most High, at the same time that it trains the population in habits of subordination and loyalty, as well as in patient submission to exactions. But it is essentially a parasitic culture, despotic, and, with due training, highly superstitious or religious. What a people of these antecedents is capable of is shown by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, the Hindu invaders of India, the Hyksos invaders of Egypt, and in another line by Israel and the Phœnicians, and in a lesser degree by the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Arabs and Turks.

It is from peoples of this culture that the great religions of the old world have come, near or remote, but it is not easy to find any substantial contribution to human culture drawn indubitably from this source apart from religious creed, cult and poetry. The domestication of animals, for instance, is not due to them; with the possible exception of the horse and the dog, that work had to be done in peaceable, sedentary communities, from whom the pastoral nomads will have taken over the stock and the industry and carried it out on a scale and with cultural consequences which do not follow from cattle-breeding under sedentary conditions. Their religion, on the other hand, seems in no case to have been carried up to the consummate stage of despotic monotheism during the nomadic-pastoral phase of their experience, but to have been worked out to a finished product presently after they had engaged on a career of conquest and had some protracted experience of warfare and despotism on a relatively large scale. The history of these great civilisations with pastoral antecedents appears to run somewhat uniformly to the effect that they collapsed as soon as they had eaten their host into a collapse. The incidents along the way between their beginning in conquest and their collapse in exhaustion are commonly no more edifying and of no more lasting significance to human culture than those which have similarly marked the course of the Turk. These great monarchies were organised by and for an intrusive dynasty and ruling class, of pastoral antecedents, and they drew their subsistence and their means of oppression from a subjugated agricultural population. In the course of this further elaboration of a predatory civilisation, the institutions proper to a large scale and to a powerful despotism and nobility resting on a servile people, were developed into a finished system; in which the final arbiter is always irresponsible force and in which the all-pervading social relation is personal subservience and personal authority. The mechanic arts make little if any progress under such a discipline of personalities, even the arts of war, and there is little if any evidence of sensible gain in any branch of husbandry. There were great palaces and cities built by slave labour and corvée, embodying untold misery in conspicuously wasteful and tasteless show, and great monarchs whose boast it was that they were each and several the best friend or nearest relative of some irresponsible and supreme god, and whose dearest claim to pre-eminence was that they “walked on the faces of the black-head race.” Seen in perspective and rated in any terms that have a workmanlike significance, these stupendous dynastic fabrics are as insignificant as they are large, and none of them is worth the least of the fussy little communities that came in time to make up the Hellenic world and its petty squabbles.

In their general traits these various civilisations founded (in conquest) by the pastoral peoples are of the same character as is the pecuniary culture as found elsewhere, but they have certain special features which set them off somewhat in a class by themselves. They are predatory in a peculiarly overt and accentuated degree, so that their institutions foster the invidious sentiments, the self-regarding animus of servility and of arrogance, beyond what commonly happens in the pecuniary culture at large; and they carry a large content of peculiarly high-wrought religious superstitions and fear of the supernatural, which likewise works out from and into an animus of servility and arrogance. In these cultures it is true, even beyond the great significance which the proposition has in the barbarian culture elsewhere, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The discipline of life in such a culture, therefore, is consistently unfavourable to any technological gain; the instinct of workmanship is constantly dominated by prevalent habits of thought that are worse than useless for any technological purpose.

Much the same, of course, is true for any civilisation founded on personal government of the coercive kind, whatever may be the remoter antecedents of the dynastic and ruling classes; but these other cultures have not the same secure and ancient patriarchal foundation, ready to hand, and so they are constrained to build their institutions of coercion, domestic, civil, political and military, more slowly and with a more doubtful outcome; nor does their religious system so readily work out in a monarchical theology with an omnipotent sovereign and in all-pervading fear of God. A home-bred despotism in an agricultural community that has set out with maternal descent, a matriarchal clan system, and mother goddesses, is hampered both on the temporal and the spiritual side by ancient and inbred usage and preconceptions that can be effectually overcome only in the long course of time. The civilisations of Asia-Minor and the Ægean region, and even of Egypt and Rome, however much of pastoral and patriarchal elements may have been infused into them in the course of time, show their shortcomings in this respect to the last; perhaps in their religions more than in any other one cultural trait, since religion is after all an epigenetic feature and follows rather than leads in the unfolding of the cultural scheme.

But these great civilisations dominated by pastoral antecedents have no grave significance for the modern culture, except as drawbacks, and none at all for modern technology or for that matter-of-fact knowledge on which modern technology runs. The Western peoples, whose cultural past is of more immediate interest, have also had their warlike experience, late and early, but it seems never to have reached the consummate outcome to be seen in the East. Neither as regards the scale on which dynastic organisation has been carried out nor as regards the thoroughness with which their institutions have been permeated by predatory preconceptions have the Western peoples in their earlier history approached the standard of the oriental despotisms. Even now, it may be remarked, advocates of war and armaments commonly speak (doubtless disingenuously) for the predatory régime as being a necessity of defence rather than something to be desired on its own merits. Not that the predatory régime has not been a sufficiently grave fact in the history of occidental civilisation; to take such a view of history one would have to overlook the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the Catholic church, the Era of statemaking, and the existing armed neutrality of the powers; but these have, all but the last, proved to be episodes on a grand scale rather than such an historical finality as any one of the successive monarchies in the Mesopotamian-Chaldæan country,—the test being that occidental civilisation has not died of any one of these maladies, though it has come through more than one critical period.

Western civilisation has gone through these eras of accentuated predation and has at all times shown an appreciable admixture of predatory conceptions in its scheme of institutions and ideals, in its domestic institutions and its public affairs, in its art and religion, but it is after all within the mark to say that, at least since the close of the Dark Ages, a distinctive characteristic that sets off this civilisation in contradistinction from any definitively predatory phase of the pecuniary culture, has been a pertinacious pursuit of the arts of peace, to which those peoples that have led in this civilisation have ever returned at every respite. For an appreciation of the relations subsisting between the sense of workmanship and the discipline of habituation in the modern culture, therefore, the phenomena of peaceful ownership are of greater, or at least of more vivid interest than those of the predatory phase of the pecuniary culture.

Modern civilisation, and indeed all history for that matter, lies within the pecuniary culture as a whole; but the Western culture of modern times belongs, perhaps somewhat precariously, to the secondary or peaceable phase of this pecuniary culture, rather than to that predatory phase with which the pecuniary scheme of life began somewhere in the lower barbarism, and that has repeatedly closed its life cycle in the collapse of one and another of the great dynastic empires of the old world.

As in the predatory phase, so also in the peaceable pecuniary culture, the dominant note is given by the self-regarding impulses; and the sense of workmanship is therefore characteristically hedged about and guided by the institutional exigencies and preconceptions incident to life under the circumstances imposed by ownership,—in a situation where the economic interest, the interest in those material means of life with which workmanship has to deal, converges on property rights. Ownership is self-regarding, of course, and the rights of ownership are of a personal, invidious, differential, emulative nature; although in the peaceable phase of the civilisation of ownership, force and fraud are, in theory, barred out of the game of acquisition,—wherein this differs from the predatory phase proper.

An obvious consequence following immediately on the emergence of ownership in any community is an increased application to work. This has been taken as a matter of course in theoretical speculations and is borne out by the observation of peoples among whom trade relations have been introduced in recent times. An immediate result is greater diligence, accompanied apparently in all cases, if the reports of observers are to be accepted, by an increase in contention, distrust and chicanery107 and an increasingly wasteful consumption of goods. The diligence so fostered by emulative self-interest is directed to the acquisition of property, in great part to the acquisition of more than is possessed by those others with whom the invidious comparison in ownership is made; and under the spur of ownership simply, it is only secondarily, as a means to the emulative end of acquisition, that productive work, and therefore workmanship in its naïve sense, comes into the case at all. Ownership conduces to diligence in acquisition and therefore indirectly to diligence in work, if no more expeditious means of acquiring wealth can be devised. In its first incidence the incentive to diligence afforded by ownership is a proposition in business not in workmanship. Its effects on workmanship, industry and technology, therefore, are necessarily somewhat uncertain and uneven. Apparently from the start there is some appreciable resort to fraudulent thrift, to the production of spurious or inferior goods.108 This of course very presently is corrected in the increased astuteness and vigilance exercised in men’s dealings with one another, whereby an appreciable portion of energy goes to defeat these artifices of disingenuous worldly wisdom.

It should be added that the pecuniary incentive to work takes the direction of making the most of the means at hand, considered as means of pecuniary gain rather than as means of serviceability, and that it conduces therefore to the fullest (pecuniary) exploitation of the standard accepted ways and means of industry rather than to the improvement of these ways and means beyond the conjuncture at hand. Further, though this is also somewhat of a tedious commonplace, since the only authentic end of work under the pecuniary dispensation is the acquisition of wealth; since the possession of wealth in so far exempts its possessor from productive work; and since such exemption is a mark of wealth and therefore of superiority over those who have nothing and therefore must work; it follows that addiction to work becomes a mark of inferiority and therefore discreditable. Whereby work becomes distasteful to all men instructed in the proprieties of the pecuniary culture; and it has even become so irksome to men trained in the punctilios of the servile, predatory, phase of this culture that it was once credibly proclaimed by a shrewd priesthood as the most calamitous curse laid on mankind by a vindictive God. Also, since wealth affords means for a free consumption of goods, the conspicuous consumption of goods becomes a mark of pecuniary excellence, and so it becomes an element of respectability in any pecuniary culture, and presently becomes a meritorious act and even a requirement of pecuniary decency. The outcome is conspicuous wastefulness of consumption, the limits of which, if any, have apparently not been approached hitherto.109

The bearings of this pecuniary culture on workmanship and technology are wide and diverse. Most immediate and perhaps most notable is the conventional disesteem of labour spoken of above, which seems to follow as a necessary consequence from the institution of ownership in all cases where distinctions of wealth are at all considerable or where property rights are associated with facts of mastery and prestige. The pecuniary disrepute of labour acts to discourage industry, but this may be offset, at least in part, by the incentive given to emulation by the good repute attaching to acquisition. The wasteful expenditure of goods and services enjoined by the pecuniary canons of conspicuous consumption gives an economically untoward direction to industry, at the same time that it greatly increases the hardships and curtails the amenities of life. So also, estrangement and distrust between persons, classes and nations necessarily pervades this cultural era, due to the incessant gnawing of incompatible pecuniary interests; and this state of affairs appreciably lowers the aggregate efficiency of human industry and sets up bootless obstacles to be overcome and irrelevant asperities to be put up with.

These and the like consequences of pecuniary emulation are simple, direct and obvious; but the discipline of the pecuniary culture bears on workmanship also in a more subtle way, indirect and less evident at first sight. The discipline of daily life imparts its own bent to the sense of workmanship through habituation of the workman to that scheme and logic of things that rules this pecuniary culture. The outcome as concerns industry is somewhat equivocal; the discipline of self-seeking at some points favours workmanship and at others not. At one period or phase of the pecuniary culture, generally speaking an early or crude phase, the bent so given to workmanship and technology seems necessarily to be conducive to inefficiency; at another (later or maturer) phase the contrary is likely to be true.

The pecuniary discipline of invidious emulation takes effect on the state of the industrial arts chiefly and most pervasively through the bias which it gives to the knowledge on which workmanship proceeds. It may be called to mind that the body of knowledge (facts) turned to account in workmanship, the facts made use of in devising technological processes and appliances, are of the nature of habits of thought. This is particularly applicable to those (tactical) principles under whose control the information in hand is construed and connected up into a system of uses, agencies and instrumentalities. These habits of thought, elements of knowledge, items of information, accepted facts, principles of reality, in part represent the mechanical behaviour of objects, the brute nature of brute matter, and in part they stand for qualities, aptitudes and proclivities imputed to external objects and their behaviour and so infused into the facts and the generalisations based on them. The sense of workmanship has much to do with this imputation of traits to the phenomena of observation, perhaps more than any other of the proclivities native to man. The traits so imputed to the facts are in the main such as will be consonant with the sense of workmanship and will lend themselves to a concatenation in its terms. But this infusion of traits into the facts of observation, whether it takes effect at the instance of the sense of workmanship, or conceivably on impulse not to be identified with this instinct, is a logical process and is carried out by an intelligence whose logical processes have in all cases been profoundly biassed by habituation. So that the habits of life of the individual, and therefore of the community made up of such individuals, will pervasively and unremittingly bend this work of imputation with the set of their own current, and will accordingly involve incoming elements of knowledge in a putative system of relations consistent with these habits of life. This comprehensive scheme of habitual apprehensions and appreciations is what is called the “genius,” spirit, or character of any given culture. In all this range of habitual preconceptions touching the nature of things there prevails a degree of solidarity, of mutual support and re-enforcement among the several lines of habitual activity comprised in the current scheme of life; so that a certain characteristic tone or bias runs through the whole,—in so far as the cultural situation has attained that degree of maturity or assimilation that will allow it to be spoken of as a distinctive whole, standing out as a determinate and coherent phase in the life-history of the race. To this bias of scope and method in the current scheme of life, intellectual and sentimental, any new element or item must be assimilated if it is not to be rejected as alien and unreal or to fall through by neglect.

All this bears on the scope and method of knowledge, and therefore on the facts made use of in the industrial arts, just as it bears on any other feature of human life that is of the nature of habit. And the immediate question is as to the bias or drift of the pecuniary culture as it affects the apprehension of facts serviceable for technological ends. This pecuniary bias or bent may be described as invidious, personal, emulative, looking to differential values in respect of personal force or competitive success, looking to gradations in respect of comparative potency, validity, authenticity, propriety, reputability, decency. The canons of pecuniary repute preclude the well-to-do, who have leisure for such things, from inquiring narrowly into the facts of technology, since these things are beneath their dignity, conventionally distasteful; familiarity with such matters can not with propriety be avowed, nor can they without offence and humiliation be canvassed at all intimately among the better class. At the same time pecuniary competition, when carried to its ideal pitch, works the lower industrial classes to exhaustion and allows them no appreciable leisure or energy for indulging any possible curiosity of this kind on their part. The habitual (ideal) frame of mind is that of invidious self-interest on the one hand, due to the imperative and ubiquitous need of gain in wealth or in rank, and on the other hand class discrimination due to the ubiquitous prevalence of distinctions in prerogatives and authentic standing. The discipline of the pecuniary religions, or of the religious tenets and observances proper to the pecuniary culture, runs to a similar effect; more decisively so in the earlier, or distinctively predatory, phases of this culture than in the peaceable or commercial phase. The vulgar facts of industry are beneath the dignity of a feudalistic deity or of his priesthood; at the same time that the overmastering need of standing well in the graces of an all-powerful, exacting and irresponsible God throws a deeper shadow of ignobility over the material side of life, and makes any workmanlike preoccupation with industrial efficiency presumptively sinful as well as indecorous.

The pecuniary culture is not singular in this matter. Always and everywhere the acquirement of knowledge is a matter of observation guided and filled out by the imputation of qualities, relations and aptitudes to the observed phenomena. Without this putative content of active presence and potency the phenomena would lack reality; they could not be assimilated in the scheme of things human. It is only a commonplace of the logic of apperception that the substantial traits of objective facts are a figment of the brain. Under the discipline of this pecuniary phase of culture the requisite imputation of character to facts runs, as ever, in anthropomorphic terms; but it is an anthropomorphism which by habit conforms to the predatory-pecuniary scheme of preconceptions, such as the routine of life has made ready and convincing to men living under the discipline of emulation, invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary decorum. Under these circumstances it is not in the anthropomorphism of naïve workmanship that the putative reality of facts is to be sought, but in their conformity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of the established institutional values and the ordinances of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which sense impressions are reduced to objective fact and so become available for use, and under which, again, facts are put in practice and turned to technological account, are the same canons of invidious distinction that rule in the world of property and among men occupied with predatory and pecuniary precedence. In effect men and things come to be rated in terms of what they (putatively) are—their intrinsic character—rather than in terms of what they (empirically) will do.

Without pursuing the question farther at this point, it should be evident that the bias of the pecuniary culture must on the whole act with pervasive force so to bend men’s knowledge of the things with which they have to do as to lessen its serviceability for technological ends. The result is a deflection from matter-of-fact to matter of imputation, and the imputation is of the personal character here spoken of. The dominant note appears to be a differential rating in respect of aggressive self-assertion, whether in human or non-human agents. Theological preconceptions are commonly strong in the pecuniary culture, and under their rule this differential rating developes into a scheme of graded powers and efficacies vested in the phenomena of external nature by delegation from an overruling personal authority. Such a bent is necessarily prejudicial to workmanship, and it may seem that the ubiquitous repressive force of this metaphysics of authority and authenticity should serve the same disserviceable end for workmanship as the more genial and diffuse anthropomorphism of the lower cultures, but with more decisive effect since it runs in a more competently organised, compact and prescriptive fashion.

Where the pecuniary culture has been carried through consistently on the predatory plan, without being diverted to that commercial phase current in the latterday Western civilisation, the conclusion of the matter has been decay of the industrial arts and effectual dissipation of that system of matter-of-fact knowledge on which technological efficiency rests. In the West, where the predatory phase proper has eventually given place to a commercial phase of the same pecuniary culture, the general run of events in this bearing has been a decline of knowledge, technology and workmanship, running on so long as the predatory (coercive) rule prevailed unbroken, but followed presently by a slow recovery and advance in technological efficiency and scientific insight; somewhat in proportion as the commercialisation of this culture has gained ground, and therefore correlated also in a general way with the decline of religious fear.

This run of events may tempt to the inference that while the predatory phase proper of this pecuniary civilisation is inimical to matter-of-fact knowledge and to technological insight, the rule of commercial ideas and ideals characteristic of its subsequent peaceable phase acts to propagate these material elements of culture. But what has already appeared in the course of the inquiry into that still earlier cultural phase that went before the coercive and invidious régime of predation suggests that the case is not so simple nor so flattering to our latterday self-complacency. The self-regarding sentiments of arrogance and abasement, out of whose free habitual exercise the pecuniary culture, with its institutions of prerogative and differential advantage, has been built up, are not the spiritual source from which such an outcome is to be looked for. These sentiments and the instinctive proclivities of which these sentiments are the emotional expression are presumed to have remained unchanged in force and character through that long course of cumulative habituation that has given them their ascendency in the institutions of the pecuniary culture, and of their own motion they will yield now results of the same kind as ever. But the like is true also for those other instincts out of whose working came the earlier gains made in knowledge and workmanship under the savage culture, before the self-regarding sentiments underlying the pecuniary culture took the upper hand. The parental bent and the instincts of workmanship and of curiosity will have been overborne by cumulative habituation to the rule of the self-regarding proclivities that triumphed in the culture of predation, and whose dominion has subsequently suffered some impairment in the later substitution of property rights for tenure by prowess, but these instincts that make for workmanship remain as intrinsic to human nature as the others. What is to be said for the current commercial scheme of life, therefore, appears to be that it is only less inimical to the functioning of those instinctive propensities that serve the common interest. Hence, gradually, these instincts and the non-invidious interests which they engender have been coming effectually into bearing again as fast as the stern repression of them exercised by the full-charged predatory scheme of life has weakened into a less and less effectual inhibition, under the discipline of compromise and mitigated self-aggrandisement embodied in the rights of property.

That authentication of ownership out of which the sacred rights of property have apparently grown may well have arisen as a sort of mutual insurance among owners as against the disaffection of the dispossessed; which would presently give rise to a sentiment of solidarity within the class of owners, would acquire prescriptive force through habitual enforcement, become a matter of customary right to be consistently respected under the institutional forms of property, and eventuate in that highly moralised expression of self-aggrandisement which it is today. But with the putting-away of fancy-free predation, as being a conventionally disallowed means of self-aggrandisement, sentiments of equity and solidarity would presently come in—perhaps at the outset by way of disingenuous make-believe—and so the way would be made easier under the shelter of this range of conceptions for a rehabilitation of the primordial parental instinct and its penchant for the common good. And when ownership has once been institutionalised in this impersonal and quasi-dispassionate form it will lend but a decreasingly urgent bias to the cultural scheme in the direction of differential respect of persons and a differential rating of natural phenomena in respect of the occult potencies and efficacies imputed to them.

As the institutional ground has shifted from free-swung predation to a progressively more covert régime of self-aggrandisement and differential gain, the instinct of workmanship has progressively found freer range and readier access to its raw material. The differential good repute of wealth and rank has of course continued to be of much the same nature in the later (commercial) stages of the pecuniary culture as in the earlier (predatory) stages. An aristocratic (or servile) scheme of life must necessarily run in invidious terms, since that is the whole meaning of the phenomenon; and resting as any such scheme does on pecuniary distinctions, whether direct or through the intermediary term of predatory exploit, it will necessarily involve the corollary that wealth and exemption from work (otium cum dignitate) is honourable and that poverty and work is dishonourable. But with the progressive commercialisation of gain and ownership it also comes to pass that peaceable application to the business in hand may have much to do with the acquirement of a reputable standing; and so long as work is of a visibly pecuniary kind and is sagaciously and visibly directed to the acquisition of wealth, the disrepute intrinsically attaching to it is greatly offset by its meritorious purpose. So much so, indeed, that there has even grown up something of a class feeling, among the class who have come by their wealth through industry and shrewd dealing, to the effect that peaceable diligence and thrift are meritorious traits.

This is “middle-class” sentiment of course. The aristocratic contempt for the tradesman and all his works has not suffered serious mitigation through all this growth of new methods of reputability. The three conventionally recognised classes, upper, middle, and lower, are all and several pecuniary categories; the upper being typically that (aristocratic) class which is possessed of wealth without having worked or bargained for it; while the middle class have come by their holdings through some form of commercial (business) traffic; and the lower class gets what it has by workmanship. It is a gradation of (a) predation, (b) business, (c) industry; the former being disserviceable and gainful, the second gainful, and the third serviceable. And no modern civilised man is so innocent of the canons of reputability as not to recognise off-hand that the first category is meritorious and the last discreditable, whatever his individual prejudices may lead him to think of the second. Aristocracy without unearned wealth, or without predatory antecedents, is a misnomer. When an aristocratic class loses its pecuniary advantage it becomes questionable. A poverty-stricken aristocrat is a “decayed gentleman;” and “the nobility of labour” is a disingenuous figure of speech.

The transition from the original predatory phase of the pecuniary culture to the succeeding commercial phase signifies the emergence of a middle class in such force as presently to recast the working arrangements of the cultural scheme and make peaceable business (gainful traffic) the ruling interest of the community. With the same movement emerges a situation which is progressively more favourable to the intellectual animus required for workmanship and an advance in technology. The state of the industrial arts advances, and with its advance the accumulation of wealth is accelerated, the gainfulness of business traffic increases, and the middle (business) class grows along with it. It is in the conscious interest of this class to further the gainfulness of industry, and as this end is correlated with the productiveness of industry it is also, though less directly, correlated with improvements in technology.

With the transition from a naïvely predatory scheme to a commercial one, the “competitive system” takes the place of the coercive methods previously employed, and pecuniary gain becomes the incentive to industry. At least superficially, or ephemerally, the workman’s income under this pecuniary régime is in some proportion to his product. Hence there results a voluntary application to steady work and an inclination to find and to employ improvements in the methods and appliances of industry. At the same time commercial conceptions come progressively to supplant conceptions of status and personal consequence as the primary and most familiar among the habits of thought entailed by the routine of daily life. This will be true especially for the common man, as contrasted with the aristocratic classes, although it is not to be overlooked that the standards of propriety imposed on the community by the better classes will have a considerably corrective effect on the frame of mind of the common man in this respect as in others, and so will act to maintain an effective currency of predatory ideals and preconceptions after the economic situation at large has taken on a good deal of a commercial complexion. The accountancy of price and ownership throws personal prestige and consequence notably less into the foreground than does the rating in terms of prowess and gentle birth that characterises the predatory scheme of life. And in proportion as such pecuniary accountancy comes to pervade men’s relations, correspondingly impersonal terms of rating and appreciation will make their way also throughout men’s habitual apprehension of external facts, giving the whole an increasingly impersonal complexion. So far as this effect is had, the facts of observation will lend themselves with correspondingly increased facility and effect to the purposes of technology. So that the commercial phase of culture should be favourable to advance in the industrial arts, at least as regards the immediate incidence of its discipline.