Popular welfare is bound up with the conduct of busineas ; because industry is managed for business ends, and also because there prevails throughout modern communities a settled habit of rating the means of livelihood and the amenities of life in pecuniary terms. But apart from their effect in controlling the terms of livelihood from day to day, these principles are also in great measure decisive in the larger affairs of life, both for the individual in his civil relations and for the community at large in its political concerns. Modem (civilized) institutions rest, in great part, on business principles. This is the meaning, as applied to the modem situation, of the current phrases about the Economic Interpretation of History, or the Materialistic Theory of History. . Because of this settled habit of seeing all the I conjunctures of life from the business point of \ view, in terms of profit and loss, the management ' of the affairs of the community at large falls by common consent into the hands of business men
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and is guided by business considerations. Hence mctdem politics is businesa politics, even apart from the sinister application of the phrase to what is invidiously called corrupt politics. This is true both of foreign and domestic policy. Legislation, police surveillance, the administration of justice, the military and diplomatic service, all are chiefly concerned with business relations, pecuniary interests, and they have little more than an incidental bearing on other human interests. All this apparatus is also charged with the protection of life and personal liberty, but its work in this bearing has much of a pecuniary color.