There are intelligible historical reasons why our great grandfathers adopted this view. They found themselves in a world regulated by the customs and beliefs of a landed society. They could not operate their factories successfully in such a society, and they rebelled fiercely against the customs which restricted them. That rebellion [p242] was rationalized in the philosophy of _laissez-faire_ which meant in essence that machine industry must not be interfered with by landlords and peasants who had feudal rights, nor by governments which protected those rights. On the positive side this rebellion expressed itself in declarations of the rights of man. These declarations were a denial of the vested rights of men under the old landed order and an assertion of the rights of men, particularly the new middle-class men, who proposed to make the most of the new industrial and mechanical order. By the rights of men they meant primarily freedom of contract, freedom of trade, freedom of occupation—those freedoms, that is to say, which made it possible for the new employer to buy and sell, to hire and fire without being accountable to anyone. The prophet of this new dispensation was Adam Smith. In the _Wealth of Nations_ he wrote that All systems either of preference or of restraint ... being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The employing class in the early days of capitalism honestly believed, and indeed its less enlightened members still believe to this very day, that somehow the general welfare will be served by trusting naively to the acquisitive instincts of the employing capitalist. Thus at the outset the machine technology was applied under the direction of men who scorned as sentimental, when they [p243] did not regard as subversive, that disinterestedness which alone makes possible the machine technology itself. They did not understand science. They merely exploited certain of the inventions which scientists produced. What they believed, insofar as they had any philosophy, was that there exists a preestablished harmony in the universe—an “obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” in Adam Smith’s language, “which establishes itself of its own accord”—by which if each man naively pursued his primitive impulse to have and to hold in competition with other men, peace, prosperity, and happiness would ensue.