Such elements, however, do not free this adventure into speculation from its perils. They merely make the hazards mortal. In the paragraphs below the economic opinion in America is recklessly resolved into four main classes. These are the _laissez-faire_ opinion of the mid-19th century, the conventional “case for capitalism,” the protestant demand for “control,” and the academic insistence upon conscious “direction” of industrial change. Radical opinion gets a competent judgment elsewhere in this volume. Even in this bold outline the opinions of small minorities are lost to sight, and views and doctrines, seemingly alien to the authors who know their subtle differences, are often blurred into a single picture. To avoid the charge that the lion and the lamb have been pictured as one, no names have been called. Here as elsewhere particulars will rise up to curse their generalizations, and the whole will be found to be entirely too scanty to be disbursed into its parts. But the chance must be taken, and, after all, truth does not reside in copy-book mottoes. I The current types of economic opinion in this country all have a common origin. The men who express them are but a scant generation or two removed from the country or the small town. The opinions are so many variants of a stream of thought which goes back to a mid-19th century America of small towns and open country. This primitive economic opinion was formed out of the dust of the ground in the likeness of an exploitative America. The conditions which shaped it might be set forth in two lines of a school history thus: First, abundant natural resources; second, a scanty population; and third, the principle of letting the individual alone. It was a chance at an economic opportunity which made America of the 19th century the “land of promise.” The raw materials of personal wealth were here in soil, stream, and mine. The equipment necessary to the crude exploitative farming of the time was easy to possess. Since there was an abundance, the resources essential to a chance at a living were to be had for the asking. One with enterprise enough to “go it alone” lived upon what he himself and his wealth in wife and children produced. He did not have to drive a shrewd bargain for the sale of his labour nor purchase the wherewithal to be fed and clothed in a market. There was no confusing scheme of prices to break the connection between effort and reward; opportunity and responsibility went hand in hand; success or failure was of one’s own fashioning. Where nature does most, man claims all; and in rural America men were quite disposed to claim personal credit for nature’s accomplishments. Since ample resources smothered even mediocre effort in plenty, the voice of chronic failure which blamed circumstance, fate, or “the system” was unheard. A freedom to have and to hold economic resources plentiful enough to supply all was the condition of material prosperity.