Chapter VI · The Era of Handicraft122 (continued 2)

The Natural Rights which so found authentication at the hands of the jurists were of the individualistic kind which the discipline of the handicraft system had inculcated, and the authentication found in the jus naturale does not range much beyond the individualistic bounds so prescribed, nor are other lines of ancient prescription, at variance with these rights, brought at all prominently into the light by the legal inquiries of the jurists. Whereas it is no matter of serious question that the chief bearing of the ancient findings embodied in the code is not of this individualistic character. The causes which brought on the modern acceptance of this scheme of Natural Rights are a matter of use and wont, quite distinct from that line of argument by which the jurists established them on grounds of sufficient reason resting on ancient prescription.

The extreme tenacity of life shown by the system of Natural Rights may raise a reasonable doubt as to the adequacy of any account that assigns their derivation to the discipline of use and wont peculiar to any particular cultural era, even when the era in question is of so consistent a character and such protracted duration as the era of handicraft. What adds force to such a question is the fact that something like these preconceptions of natural right is not uncommon in the lower cultures. So that on the face of the returns there appears to be good ground in the nature of things for designating these conventional rights “natural.” Something of the kind is current in an obvious fashion among the peaceable communities on the lower levels of culture, among whom the scheme of accepted rights and obligations bears more than a distant resemblance to the Natural Rights of the eighteenth century. But something of the kind will also be found among peoples on a higher level, both peaceable and predatory; though departing more notably in point of contents from the eighteenth-century system. The point of similarity, or of identity, among all these systems of conventionally fundamental and eternal human rights is to be found in their intrinsic sanction—they are all and several right and good as a matter of course and of common sense; the point of divergence or dissimilarity is to be found in the contents of the code, which are not nearly the same in all cases. In the mediæval natural common-sense scheme of rights, prerogative, personal and class exemption, is of the essence of the canon; but the scheme is none the less intrinsically mandatory on those who had been bred into a matter-of-course acceptance of it by the routine of life in that age. Differential rights, duties and privilege give the point of departure in this mediæval system of civil relations; whereas in the system worked out under the auspices of the handicraft industry the denial of differential advantage, whether class or individual, is the beginning of wisdom and the substance of common sense as applied to civil relations. The one of these schemes comes out of an economic situation drawn on lines of predation, ancient, prescriptive and settled, and its first principle is that of master and servant; the other comes of a situation grounded in workmanlike efficiency, and its first principle is that of an equitable livelihood for work done.

That some of the working systems of civil rights in customary force among the peaceable communities of the lower culture have more in common with modern Natural Rights than this mediæval scheme, should logically be due to a similarity in the conditions of life out of which they have arisen. In these savage or lower barbarian communities, too, the principle of organization is work for a livelihood, and the conventional ground of economic relations is that of workmanship, as it is under the early handicraft system; but with the difference that whereas the technology of handicraft throws the skilled workman into perspective as a self-sufficient individual, and so throws self-help into the foreground as the principle of economic equity, among these savages and lower barbarians living by means of a technology of a less highly specialised character, with a material situation not admitting of the same degree of severalty in work or livelihood, the prime requisite in the relations governing the rights and duties of the members of the group is not the individual livelihood of the skilled workman but that of the group at large. The individual’s personal claims come in only as secondary and subservient to the needs of the group at large; rights of ownership are loose and vague, and they lack that tenacity of life that characterises the like rights under the handicraft system. It is true, the product of industry belongs primarily to the producer of it, it is his in some sense that might pass into ownership if the technological situation admitted of work for a livelihood in strict and consistent severalty; but in the actual case as found on these lower levels the product commonly escapes somewhat easily from his individual possession and comes to inure to the use of the group. Except for such articles as continue to pertain to him by virtue of intimate and daily use, the producer’s possessive control of his product is likely at the best to be transient and dubious, readily giving way before any urgent call for its use by other members of the group.137

A fact of some incisive effect in this connection is doubtless the characteristic trait of handicraft that, in its early phases wholly and obviously and in its later development also somewhat evidently, it was the affair of a class; whereas in the savage communities with which it is here compared, the technology and the livelihood in question are those of the community at large, not of a class that stands in contrast and in some degree of competition with the community at large. The craftsmen were a fraction of the community by work for whose needs they got their livelihood, even though, in the course of time, they became the dominant element within the local community (municipality) whose fortunes they shared. And as between this fraction of the population and outside classes with whom they carried on their traffic, particularly the well-to-do and land-holding classes, there could be no constraining sense of a solidarity of interest. The ancient bond of master and servant had been broken by something like an overt act of class secession on the part of the craftsmen, and nothing like a bond of fellowship had taken its place. The fellowship ran within the lines of craftsmanship, while the traffic of each craftsman typically ran across the line that divided the craftsman from the old order and population outside of this industrial system.

That the eighteenth-century system of Natural Rights shows such a degree of approximation to the scheme of rights and obligations observed among many primitive peoples need flutter no one’s sense of cultural consistency. Return to Nature was more or less of a password in the closing period of the era of handicraft and after, and in respect of this system of civil relations it appears that the popular attitude of that time was in effect something of a reversion to primitive habits of thought; though it was at best a partial return to a “state of nature” in the sense of a state of peace and industry rather than a return to the unsophisticated beginnings of society. That such a partial reversion takes effect in the habits of thought of the time appears to be due to a similarly partial return to somewhat analogous habits of life. The correspondence in the habits of thought is no greater than that in the habits of life out of which these habits of thought emerged. The primitive peoples that show this suggestive resemblance to the system of Natural Rights typically are living under a routine of workmanship and in a state of habitual peace,—in these respects being placed somewhat similarly to the handicraft community. The handicraft system comes true to the same characterisation in so far that it was dominated by a routine of workmanship and so far as, in effect, its life-history falls in an era of prevailingly peaceable conditions; and such a characterisation holds true of the industrial community proper through the period during which handicraft is the ruling factor in the community’s habitual range of interest. It is not that the era of handicraft was an era of reversion to savagery, but only that the tone-giving factor in the community of that time reverted, by force of the state of the industrial arts, to habits of peace and industry, in which direct and detailed manual work takes a leading place. There is also the further point of economic contact with the savage state that in the handicraft community distinctions of wealth are neither large nor of decisive consequence during the long period of habituation that brought the preconceptions of that era into the settled shape that gave them the character of a finished and balanced system of principles.

It may be added, at the risk of tedious repetition, that the habits of life characteristic of the era, as well as the frame of mind suited to this characteristic routine of life, seem peculiarly suited to the native endowment of the European peoples,—perhaps in an especial degree suited to the native bent of those sections of the population in which there is an appreciable admixture of the dolicho-blond stock. That such may be the case is at least strongly suggested by the tenacious hold which this system of Rights apparently still has on the sentimental allegiance of these Western peoples, after the conditions to which these Rights owe their rise, and to which they are suited, have in the main ceased to exist; as well as by the somewhat blind fervour with which these peoples, and more especially the English-speaking section of them, go about the idyllic enterprise of rehabilitating that obsolescent “competitive system” that embodied the system of Natural Rights, and that came up with the era of handicraft and went under in its dissolution.