There seems reason to believe, as is commonly believed, that so long as that relatively direct and simple scheme of industry and trade lasted, the right of ownership and contract was a salutary custom, in its bearing on the fortunes of the common man.

It appears also, on the whole, to have been favorable to the fuller development of the handicraft technology, as well as to its eventual outgrowth into the new line of technological expedients and contrivances that presently gave rise to the machine industry and the large-scale business enterprise.
The standard theories of economic science have assumed the rights of property and contract as axiomatic premises and ultimate terms of analysis; and their theories are commonly drawn in such a form as would fit the circumstances of the handicraft industry and the petty trade, and such as can be extended to any other economic situation by shrewd interpretation.

These theories, as they run from Adam Smith down through the nineteenth century and later, appear tenable, on the whole, when taken to apply to the economic situation of that earlier time, in virtually all that they have to say on questions of wages, capital, savings, and the economy and efficiency of management and production by the methods of private enterprise resting on these rights of ownership and contract and governed by the pursuit of private gain.

It is when these standard theories are sought to be applied to the later situation, which has outgrown the conditions of handicraft, that they appear nugatory or meretricious.

The "competitive system" which these standard theories assume as a necessary condition of their own validity, and about which they are designed to form a defensive hedge, would, under those earlier conditions of small-scale enterprise and personal contact, appear to have been both a passably valid assumption as a premise and a passably expedient scheme of economic relations and traffic.