The conditions which made the economic opinion of the America of small towns and open country are gone. With their passing the older theories have been reshaped to new purposes. There are no longer free economic opportunities for all comers. Natural resources have been appropriated, and the natural differences between men have been enhanced by the artificial ones of ownership and inheritance. Wealth and control have alike been stripped from the many and concentrated in the few. The prevailing unit in business is the corporation. Establishments have been gathered into industries, and these have been articulated into a mighty industrial system, with its established rights, its customary ways of doing things, and its compulsions upon those who serve it. The older personal relation of “master” and “servant” abides only in indices of the records of the law courts. The contract of employment is now between a “soulless” but “legal entity” and a mere creature of flesh and blood. The more human individual, the survival of a less mechanical age, no longer lives upon the fruit of his individual toil. His welfare is pent in between his wages and the prices which he must pay for his necessities. Beyond this immediate bargain lies a mysterious economic system filled with unknown causes which threaten his income and even his employment. Those who possess have come into succession to those who ventured. In short, free enterprise has given way to an established system. These events have left their mark upon economic opinion. It is altogether fitting that those who fell heir to the wealth piled up by free enterprise should gain its outer defences of theory and dialectic. So the older economics, with its logic and its blessing, has come as a legacy to those who have. Its newer statement, because of its well-known objective, may be called “the case for capitalism.” In its revision the adventurous militarism bent upon exploitation has given way to a pacifistic defence of security, possession, and things as they are. In outward form few changes were necessary to convert the older theory of _laissez-faire_ into a presentable case for capitalism. A more rigid and absolute statement of the classical doctrine was almost enough. In its terms the economic order is independent of other social arrangements. It is an automatic, self-regulating mechanism. Over it there rules an immutable and natural “law of supply and demand.” This maintains just prices, prevents exploitation, adjusts production and consumption to each other, secures the maximum of goods and services from the resources at hand, and disburses incomes in accordance with the merits of men and the verity of things. So just and impartial is the operation of this law that interference by the State amounts to meddlesome muddling. It cannot override natural law; therefore it should not.