Business Principles

traffic the presumption that there must in the natural course of things be a stable and orderly increase of the property invested. Under no economic system earlier than the advent of the machine industry does profit on investment seem to have been accounted a normal or unquestionably legitimate source of gain. Under the agrarian-manorial I regime of the Middle Ages it was not felt that the wealth of the large owners must, as a matter of I course, increase by virtue of the continued employIment of what they already had in hand — whatlever may be the historical fact as regards the increase of wealth in their hands. Particularly, it was not the sense of the men of that time that wealth so employed must increase at any stated, " ordinary " rate per time unit. Similarly as regards other traffic in those days, even as regards mercantile ventures. Gain from investment was felt to be a fortuitous matter, not reducible to a stated rate. This is reflected, e.g., in the tenacious protests against the taking or paying of interest and in the ingenious sophistries by which the payment of interest was defended or explained away. Only under more settled commercial relations during the era of handicraft did the payment of interest gradually come to be accepted into full legitimacy. But even then gains from other business employments than mercantile traffic were apparently viewed as an increase due to