industry; as, e-g.^ when a sudden demand for war stores starts a wave of prosperity by force of large and lucrative demand for the products of certain industries, and these in turn draw on their neighbors in the sequence, and so transmit a wave of business activity.
The keeping of the industrial balance, therefore, and adjusting the several industrial processes to one another's work and needs, is a matter of grave and far-reaching consequence in any modem community, as has already been shown. Now, the means by which this balance is kept is business transactions, and the men in whose keeping it lies are the business men. The channel by which K disturbances are transmitted from member to
^1 member of the comprehensive industrial system is
^P the business relations between the several memhera
^1 of the system ; and, under the modern conditions
^1 of ownership, disturbances, favorable or unfavoi^
^1 able, in the field of industry are transmitted by
^B nothing but these business relations. Hard times
^M or prosperity spread through the system by means
^1 of business relations, and are in their primary
^V expression phenomena of the business situation
^1 simply. It is only secondarily that the disturb-
H ances in question show themselves as alterations
H in the character or magnitude of the mechanical
H 1 proces.ses involved. Industry is carried on for