e, the scheme and logic of that
life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings,
whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency
and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the
constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of
the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case
were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal
valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force
and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its
outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual
workman," in the words of Adam Smith.

The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry,
commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the
political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may
well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal
plane of rivalry and jealousy between dynasties and between their
States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering,
warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a
field in which man-power and personal qualities decided the outcome, by
virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry
and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the
direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which
state-making and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to
be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.

The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted
handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in
terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like,
instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The
new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it
even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in
the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes
for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argument. The
logic of the handicraft system took the impersonal agencies for granted;
the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the
workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the
consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the
personal agents enga