The opponents of government regulation of industry claim that it will retard or arrest progress by restricting the right of individual initiative. They profess to believe that the best results for society as a whole are obtained when every corporation or industrial combination is allowed to manage its business with a free hand. It is assumed by those who advocate this policy that there is no real conflict of interests between the capitalists who control the present-day aggregations of corporate wealth and the general public. No argument is needed, however, to convince any one familiar with the facts of recent industrial development that this assumption is not true. The change in the attitude of the people toward the let-alone theory of government is, as a matter of fact, the outcome of an intelligently directed effort to enlarge and democratize--not abridge--the right of initiative in its relation to the management of industry. The right of individual initiative in the sense of the right to exercise a real control over production was lost by the masses when the substitution of machinery for tools made them directly dependent upon a class of capital-owning employers. The subsequent growth of large scale production has centralized the actual control of industry in the hands of a small class of large capitalists. The small capitalists as separate and independent producers are being rapidly crushed or absorbed by the great corporation. They may still belong to the capitalist class in that they live upon an income derived from the ownership of stock or bonds. But they have no real control over the business in which their capital is invested. They no longer have the power to organize and direct any part of the industrial process. They enjoy the benefits which accrue from the ownership of wealth, but they can no longer take an active part in the management of industry. For them individual initiative in the sense of an effective control over the industrial process has disappeared almost as completely as it has in the case of the mere wage-earner. Individual initiative even for the capital-owning class has thus largely disappeared. It has been superseded by corporate initiative which means the extinguishment of individual initiative except in those cases where it is secured to the large capitalist through the ownership of a controlling interest in the business.