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 time appears to have had no misgivings about the excellence of the scheme or of that article of Natural Rights that underlies it. This complexion of things, as touches the effectual bearing of the institution of property and the ancient customary rights of ownership, has changed substantially since the time of Adam Smith. The "competitive system," which he looked to as the economic working-out of that "simple and obvious system of natural liberty" that always engaged his best affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. _De jure_, of course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but _de facto_ the common man is now, and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial usage and authenticated with statute and precedent. But circumstances have so changed that this good old plan has in a degree become archaic, perhaps unprofitable, or even mischievous, on the whole, and especially as touches the conditions of life for the common man. At least, so the common man in these modern democratic and commercial countries is beginning to apprehend the matter.