duration, and commonly extend in several directions. These contracts may he of the nature of loans, advances, outstanding accounts, engagements for future delivery or future acceptance, but in the nature of the case they involve credit obligations. Credit, whether under that name or under the name of orders, contracts, accounts, and the like, is inseparable from the management of modern industry in all that con-
THE THEORY OF MODERN WELFARE 189
cems the working relations between businesses that are not under one ownership, or between which the relations resting on separate ownership have not been placed in abeyance by some such expedient as lease, pool, syndicate, trust agreement, and the like. Credit relations of one kind and another are also found expedient and profitable at many points where their employment is not preciaely unavoidable. These extended credit relations are requisite to the most expeditious and profitable conduct of business, and so to the highest degree of success of the business. Under the regime of the machine industry and modern businees methods it is probably fair to say that the use of credit, apart from loan capital and leases, unavoidably goes to the extent required to cover all goods in process of elaboration, from the raw material to the finished goods, in so far as the goods change hands (in point of ownership) during the process.
(4) The conduct of industry by competing business concerns involves an extensive use of loan credit, as spoken of in Chapter V. above.
The four conditions recited are characteristic
features of that recent past during which brisk
times, crises, and depressions followed one another
with some regularity as incidents of the normal
course of business." Certain qualifications of this