This visible difference between the old order and the new is closely dependent on the difference between the purposes that guide the older scheme of economic life and those of the new. Under the old order, industry, and even such trade as there was, was a quest of livelihood; under the new order industry is directed by the quest of profits. Formerly, therefore, times were good or bad according as the industrial processes yielded a sufficient or an insufficient output of the means of life. Latterly times are good or bad according as the process of business yields an adequate or inadequate rate of profits. The controlling end is different in the present, and the question of welfare turns on the degree of success with which this different ulterior end is achieved. Prosperity now means, primarily, business prosperity ; whereas it used to mean industrial sufficiency.
THE THEORY OF MODERN WELFARE 179
A theory of welfare which shall account for the phenomena of prosperity and adversity under the modem economic order must, accordingly, proceed on the circumstances which condition the modern situation, and need not greatly concern itself with the range of cirdumatancea that made or marred the common welfare under the older regime, before the age of machine industry and business enterprise.' Under the old order, when those in whose hands lay the discretion in economic affairs looked to a livelihood as the end of their endeavors, the welfare of the community was regulated " by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labor was generally applied."^ What would mar this common welfare was the occasionally disaatrous act of God in the way of unpropitious seasons and the like, or the act of man in the way of war and untoward governmental exactions. Price variations, except as conditioned by these untoward intrusive agencies, had commonly neither a wide nor a profound effect upon the even course of the community's welfare. This holds true, in a general way, even after resort to the market had come to be a fact of great importance in the life of large classes, both as an outlet for their products and as