The change in organization which has, to a considerable degree, specialized the spheres of business and management is comparable in its importance to that which separated business and labor a century and a half ago. It is specially momentous for the consumer. As long as the functions of manager, technician and capitalist were combined, as in the classical era of the factory system, in the single person of "the employer," it was not unreasonable to assume that profits and productive efficiency ran similarly together. In such circumstances the ingenuity with which economists proved {172} that, in obedience to "the law of substitution," he would choose the most economical process, machine, or type of organization, wore a certain plausibility. True, the employer might, even so, adulterate his goods or exploit the labor of a helpless class of workers. But as long as the person directing industry was himself primarily a manager, he could hardly have the training, ability or time, even if he had the inclination, to concentrate special attention on financial gains unconnected with, or opposed to, progress in the arts of production, and there was some justification for the conventional picture which represented "the manufacturer" as the guardian of the interests of the consumer. With the drawing apart of the financial and technical departments of industry--with the separation of "business" from "production"--the link which bound profits to productive efficiency is tending to be snapped. There are more ways than formerly of securing the former without achieving the latter; and when it is pleaded that the interests of the captain of industry stimulate the adoption of the most "economical" methods and thus secure industrial progress, it is necessary to ask "economical for whom"? Though the organization of industry which is most efficient, in the sense of offering the consumer the best service at the lowest real cost, may be that which is most profitable to the firm, it is also true that profits are constantly made in ways which have nothing to do with efficient production, and which sometimes, indeed, impede it.