The theory, or what there is in the way of a theory, of buaineas capital in the received body of doctrines is worked out from the point of view and for the theoretical purposes of the eigliteenthcentury scheme of natural liberty, natural rights, and natural law ; and the received theorems concerning the part played by capital and by the capitalist are substantially of the character of laws of nature, as that term was understood during the period to which these theorems owe their genesis. What these received theorems declare concerning I the nature and normal function of capital and of ' the capitalist need not be recited here ; their ' content is familiar enough to all readers, lay and ' learned. Also the merits of such a point of view for purposes of economic theory, and the adequacy of the received concept of capital for the purposes to which it was originally applied, need not detain the inquiry. Modem business management does not take that point of view, nor does ''capital" carry such a meaning to the modern business man; because the guiding circumstances under which modem business is carried on are not those supposed to be given by a beneficent order of nature, nor do the controlling purposes of business traffic include that general well-being which constituted the final term of Adam Smith's social philosophy.
As a business proposition, "capital" means a\ fond of money values ; and since the credit econ- 1
omy and corporation finance have come to be the ruling factors in industrial business, this fond of money values (taken as an aggregate)