te 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 It has been superseded by corporate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.

The abandonment of the _laissez faire_ policy, then, in favor of the
principle of government regulation of industry is the outgrowth, not of
any hostility to individual initiative, but of the conviction that the
monopoly of industrial power by the few is a serious evil. It is
manifestly impossible to restore to the masses the right of individual
initiative. Industry is too complex and too highly organized to permit a
return