all the prescriptive force of legally
authenticated immemorial custom.

Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property
and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in
much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious
and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their
betters. There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so
long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade
lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in
its bearing on the fortunes of the common man. It appears also, on the
whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the
handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new
line of technological expedients and contrivances that presently gave
rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.

The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of
property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of
analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would
fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade,
and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd
interpretation. These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through
the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when
taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in
virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital,
savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by
the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership
and contract and governed by the pursuit of private gain. It is when
these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation,
which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear
nugatory or meretricious. The "competitive system" which these standard
theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and
about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under
those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact,
appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a
passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic. At that
period of its life-history it can not be said consistently to have
worked hardship to the common man; rather the reverse. And the common
man in that