This is good, homely, traditional common sense; it reflects the habitual practical run of affairs in the industrial community of that recent past. Such was the attitude of practical men toward industrial matters at the time when the current economic situation took its rise. But such a conception is no longer so true to the practical exigencies of the immediate present, nor do the men of affairs today habitually see these matters in just this light; although the principles of the law that govern industrial enterprise still continue to embody these time-worn conceptions, to which the economists also continue to yield allegiance. Like other elements of habitual knowledge this conception of things is drawn from past experience--chiefly from a past not too remote for ready comprehension--and it carries over the frame of mind out of which it arose. In the earlier days of the machine industry, then,--say, in the closing quarter of the eighteenth century,--the conduct of industrial affairs was in the hands of business men who owned the material equipment and who directed the use of this equipment and turned it to account for their own gain, on the prescriptive ground of such ownership. Discretion and initiative vested in the capitalist-employer, who at that time, (typically) combined ownership of the plant with a somewhat immediate supervision and control of the industrial processes. The directive control of industry, covering both the volume and the character of the processes and output, was in the typical case directly bound up with the ownership of the material equipment as such,--as tangible assets, not as corporation stock-holdings. Since then changes have come over the business situation, particularly through an extensive recourse to credit, such that this time-worn conception will no longer answer the run of current business practice, particularly not as touches that large-scale enterprise that now rules industrial affairs and that is currently accepted as the type of modern business enterprise.