the market. The precise pecuniary magnitude of the business community's invested wealth, as well as the aggregate amount of the community's indebtedness, depends from hour to hour on the quotations of the stock exchange ; and it rarely happens that it remains nearly the same in the aggregate from one week's end to the next. Both capital and credit, therefore, vary from hour to hour and, within narrow limits, from place to place. The magnitude and fluctuations of business capital, — "capital" in the sense in which that term is used in business affairs, — of cour,se, stand in no hard and faat relation io the material magni'
tude of the industrial equipment ; nor do variations in the magnitude of the business capital reflect variations in the magnitude or the efficiency of the industrial equipment in any but the loosest and moBt indecisive manner. So also, and for the Bame reason, the magnitude and the variations of the aggregate credit afloat at a given time bear, at the most, but a remote, indirect, and shifty relation to the aggregate of material wealth and the material changes to which this wealth is subject. All this applies with peculiar cogency wherever and in so far as industry and business are carried on by modern expedients and in due contact with the market.