or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But
these pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of today,
for they have grown up under a past situation differing somewhat from
the present. Even for effectiveness in the pecuniary way, therefore,
they are not as apt as might be. The changed industrial life requires
changed methods of acquisition; and the pecuniary classes have some
interest in so adapting the pecuniary institutions as to give them the
best effect for acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain arises.
Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the leisure-class
guidance of institutional growth, answering to the pecuniary ends which
shape leisure-class economic life.

The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of
mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those enactments
and conventions that make for security of property, enforcement of
contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions, vested interests. Of
such bearing are changes affecting bankruptcy and receiverships, limited
liability, banking and currency, coalitions of laborers or employers,
trusts and pools. The community's institutional furniture of this kind
is of immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in
proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion as
they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly these
conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence for the
industrial process and for the life of the community. And in guiding the
institutional growth in this respect, the pecuniary classes, therefore,
serve a purpose of the most serious importance to the community, not
only in the conservation of the accepted social scheme, but also
in shaping the industrial process proper. The immediate end of this
pecuniary institutional structure and of its amelioration is the greater
facility of peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects
far outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile conduct
of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to go on with
less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of disturbances and
complications calling for an exercise of astute discrimination in
everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class itself superfluous.
As fast as pecuniary transactions are reduced to routine, the captain
of industry can