Excerpt from Principles of Social Economics: Inductively Considered and Practically Applied, With Criticisms on Current Theories

This is mainly due to the fact that the accepted theories belong to the hand-labor conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which have very little relation to the factory conditions of the nineteenth century. Nor should this be a matter of surprise, since it is entirely consistent with the law of industrial evolution. In its development society has assumed several distinct and essentially different industrial phases, which have each changed the economic structure of society, shifting the centre of industrial move ment and the point of view of economic study.

Under feudalism, for instance, the land-owning class was the centre of all social and industrial movement. Economic policy therefore was considered from the standpoint of a land-owning class.

With the development of manufacture and trade however, came a radical change in economic relations. Serfs became wage receivers, and the cultivation of the land passed to tenant farmers, which change transferred the distribution of wealth from the domain of authority, to that of economic law. By this transition the social basis of industrial prosperity was broadened, and the centre of economic movement was shifted from the industries required to supply the needs of a small land-owning class to those required to supply the demands of a relatively large commercial class, whose interests were more varied and extensive. In proportion as new conditions developed, the narrow paternal policy which was adapted to the old régime became inimical to the welfare of the community, and a reconstruction of economic doctrine from a new point of view became necessary. The efforts of two centuries to supply this need culminated in the Wealth of Nations, which really marks the advent of middle-class political economy, whose influence has practically moulded the economic thought of the present century.

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