Business is still the middleman distributing to the consumer on a small scale.

He did not, or could not, conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at present.

He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort.
His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which this equilibrium tended.

Its benefits might be improved by free trade and free workmanship; but, upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in question its fundamental dogmas.
Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions.

The problem of labor finds no place in his book.