Periods of crisis or of prosperity are, after all, relatively simple phenomena with strongly marked features, and a passable explanation of them is correspondingly easy. They have also the advantage of having received much attention at the hands of the students of economic history. On the other hand, protracted depression, not traceable to widespread hardship or calamity arising from circumstances outside the range of business transactions, is a relatively new and untried subject for economic theory. Newer, more obscure, with less pronounced features and less definite limits than movements of speculative advance or speculative crises, this phenomenon has to a less extent engaged the steady
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THE THEORY OF MODEBN WELFARE 218
attention of students. An inquirj into the life history and the causes and effects of depression, from tlie point of view of a theory of business, may therefore scarcely be expected to yield concise or secure conclusions.
Since industry waits upon business, it is a matter of course that industrial depression is primarily a depression in business. It is in business that depression is felt, since it is on the business side of economic activity that the seat of economic sensibility may be said to lie; it is also in business (pecuniary) terms that the depression is measured whenever a measure or estimate of the matter is attempted. In so far as there is an attendant derangement of the mechanical processes and of the mechanical articulation of processes in industry, the derangement follows from the pecuniary exigencies of business. Depression and industrial stagnation follow only in case the pecuniary exigencies of the situation are of such a character as to affect the traffic of the business community in an inhibitory way. But business is the quest of profits, and an inhibition of