In what has just been said above, the view is implied that the owners of the material means, who are in great part also the employers of workmen and are sentimentally spoken of as “captains of industry,” have, in effect and commonly, but a relatively loose grasp of the technological facts, possibilities, and requirements of modern industry, and that by virtue of their business training they are able to make but a scant and uncertain use of such loose ideas as they have on these heads. To anyone imbued with the commonplaces of current economic theory it may seem that exception should dutifully be taken to this view, as being an understatement of the businessmen’s technological merits. In current theoretical formulations the businessman is discussed under the caption of “entrepreneur,” “undertaker,” etc., and his gains are spoken of as “wages of superintendence,” “wages of management,” and the like. He is conceived as an expert workman in charge of the works, a superior foreman of the shop, and his gains are accounted a remuneration for his creative contribution to the process of production, due to his superior insight and initiative in technological matters. This conception of the businessman and his relation to industry has stood over from an earlier period, the period of the small-scale industry of handicraft and petty trade, when it still was true that the owner-employer, in the typical case, kept a personal oversight of his workmen and their work, and so filled the place of master-workman as well as that of buyer and seller of materials and finished goods. And such a characterisation of the businessman and his work will still hold true in the modern situation in so far as he still is occupied with industry conducted on the same small scale and continues to fill the place of a foreman of the shop. But under current conditions--the conditions of the past half century--and more particularly under the conditions of that large-scale industry that is currently accounted the type of modern industry, the businessman has ceased to be foreman of the shop, and his surveillance of industry has ceased effectually to comprise a technological management of its details; and in corresponding measure this traditional theoretical conception of the businessman has ceased to apply.