Note 121 — Chapter V · Ownership and the Competitive System

To complete the sketch at this point, even in outline, it would be necessary to go extensively into the relations of ownership and control (largely indirect) in which the owners of land and natural resources, the Landed Interest, had stood to the industrial community of craftsmen before this transition to the business era got under way, as also into the further mutual relations subsisting between the landed interest, the craftsmen and the business community during this transition to a business régime. In the most summary terms the pertinent circumstances appear to have been that from the beginning of its technological era the handicraft community, with its workmanship and its technological attainments, was in an uncertain measure at the discretionary call of the landed interest, largely in an impersonal way through channels of trade and on the whole with decreasingly exacting effect as time went on; and the industrial community at large had by no means emancipated themselves from this control when the era of business enterprise set in; for the landed interest continued to draw its livelihood from the mixed agricultural and handicraft community, and the products of handicraft still continued to go chiefly as supplies to the landed interest in return for the means of subsistence controlled by the latter; and long after the businessmen had taken over the direction of industry the claims of the landed interest still continued paramount in the economic situation, and industry still continued to be carried on largely with a view to meeting the requirements of the landed interest.