They did not ensue. And the social history of the last seventy-five years has in large measure been concerned with the birth pains of an industrial philosophy that will really suit the machine technology and the nature of man. For the notion that an intricate and delicately poised industrial mechanism could be operated by uneducated men snatching competitively at profits was soon exposed as a simple-minded delusion. It was discovered that if each banker was permitted to do what seemed to him immediately most profitable, the result was a succession of disastrous inflations and deflations of credit; that if natural resources in oil, coal, lumber, and the like were subjected to the competitive principle, the result was a shocking waste of irreplaceable wealth; that if the hiring and firing of labor were carried on under absolute freedom of contract, a whole chain of social evils in the form of child labor, unsuitable labor for women, sweating, unemployment, and the importation of cheap and unassimilable labor resulted; that if business men were left to their own devices the consumer of necessary [p244] goods was helpless when he was confronted with industries in which there was an element of monopoly. There is no need here to recount the well-known story of how in every modern community the theory of free competition has in the course of the last generation been modified by legislation, by organized labor, by organized business itself. So little has _laissez-faire_ worked under actual experience that all the powers of the government have actually had to be invoked to preserve a certain amount of compulsory “free competition.” For the industrial machine, as soon as it passes out of the early phase of rough exploitation in virgin territory, becomes unmanageable by naively competitive and acquisitive men. 4. _The Credo of Old-Style Business_ It was frequently pointed out by moralists like Ruskin and William Morris, and by churchmen as well, that this “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” by which “every man was left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way,” was not only contrary to the dogmas of the popular religion but irreconcilable with moral wisdom. The credo of the unregenerate business man was utterly atheistical in its premises, for it displaced the notion that there is any higher will than his own to which the employer is accountable. It was more than atheistical, however; it was, in Aristotle’s sense of the word, barbarous in that it implied “the living as one likes” with virtually complete acquiescence in the supremacy of the acquisitive instinct.