Dominated by the tradition handed down from the beginning of the nineteenth century, current economic theory has habitually made much of accumulated goods as the prime requisite of industry. In industrial enterprise as it was then carried on the prevailing unit of organisation was the private firm, with partnership concerns making up a secondary and less commonplace element in the business community. Ordinarily and typically these private firms and partnerships owned a certain material equipment employed in industry, and they took the initiative in industrial enterprise on the ground of this ownership; hiring the workmen, buying materials and supplies, and selling the products of the establishment. Credit relations, such as go to the creation and conduct of a modern corporation, were still of secondary consequence, being resorted to rather as an expedient in emergencies than as the initial move and the substantial ground of business organisation; the measure of the concern’s magnitude and consequence was still (typically) its unencumbered ownership of the material equipment, the size of the plant and the numbers of its hired workmen. It follows by easy consequence that in the practical business conceptions of that time the equipment of material means, which embodies the concern’s assets and affords the ground of its initiative and its rating in the business community, should commonly be rated as the prime mover in industry and the chief productive factor. So, also, the theoretical speculation that drew on that business traffic for its working concepts came unavoidably to accept these tangible assets, the community’s material equipment,--implements, livestock, raw materials, means of subsistence,--as the prime agency in the community’s economic life. As is true for the working conceptions and principles of industrial business, so also in the theoretical formulations of the economists, the community’s immaterial equipment of technological proficiency is taken for granted as a circumstance of the environment conditioning the community’s economic life,--the state of the industrial arts and the current workmanlike aptitudes and efficiency. As the phrase runs, “given the state of the industrial arts.”