business community centres upon profits and upon the shifting fortunes of the profit-maker, rather than upon accumulated and capitalized goods. Therefore the ultimate conditioning force in the conduct and aims of business is coming to ' be the prospective profit-yielding capacity of any given business move, rather than the aggregate holdings or the recorded output of product.
But this latest development in the field of industrial business has not yet come to control the field. It is rather an inchoate growth of the immediate present than an accomplished fact even of the recent past, and it can be understood only by reference to those conditions of the recent past out of which it comes. Therefore it is necessary to turn back to a further consideration of the old-fashioned business traffic as it used to go on