*** Today, Adam Smith's insights still resonate as they did after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. However, during the intervening generations the esteem in which Smith's contributions were held waxed and waned with the acceptance of free-market capitalism. After its initial acceptance in the late eighteenth century, the new economic order soon attracted criticism.
The Industrial Revolution brought "the dark Satanic mills" and all the squalor associated with them. To be sure, life for a significant part of the population at the margin of subsistence during the early days of the Industrial Revolution was misery. But it was life. A half-century earlier, many of those miserable souls would have died as infants or children.