ABSTRACT
The motive of business is pecuniary gain, the method is essentially purchase and sale. The aim and usual outcome is an accumulation of wealth. Men whose aim is not increase of possessions do not go into business, particularly not on an independent footing. In early modern times, before the regime of the machine industry set in, business enterprise on any appreciable scale commonly took the form of commercial business - some form of merchandising or banking. Since the advent of the machine age the situation has changed. The methods of business have, of course, not changed fundamentally, whatever may be true of the methods of industry; for they are, as they had been, conditioned by the facts of ownership. The outcome of the management of industrial affairs through pecuniary transactions has been to dissociate the interests of those men who exercise the discretion from the interests of the community.
