n excess of the market demand, or without due
regard to the expenses of production as determined by the market on the
side of the supplies required. Hence any business concern must adjust
its operations, by due acceleration, retardation or stoppage, to the
market conditions, with a view to what the traffic will bear; that is to
say, with a view to what will yield the largest obtainable net gain. So
long as the price system rules, that is to say so long as industry is
managed on investment for a profit, there is no escaping this necessity
of adjusting the processes of industry to the requirements of a
remunerative price; and this adjustment can be taken care of only by
well-advised acceleration or curtailment of the processes of industry;
which answers to the definition of sabotage. Wise business management,
and more particularly what is spoken of as safe and sane business
management, therefore, reduces itself in the main to a sagacious use of
sabotage; that is to say a sagacious limitation of productive processes
to something less than the productive capacity of the means in hand.

* * * * *

To anyone who is inclined to see these matters of usage in the light of
their history and to appraise them as phenomena of habituation,
adaptation and supersession in the sequence of cultural proliferation,
there should be no difficulty in appreciating that this institution of
ownership that makes the core of the modern institutional structure is
a precipitate of custom, like any other item of use and wont; and that,
like any other article of institutional furniture, it is subject to the
contingencies of supersession and obsolescence. If prevalent habits of
thought, enforced by the prevalent exigencies of life and livelihood,
come to change in such a way as to make life under the rule imposed by
this institution seem irksome, or intolerable, to the mass of the
population; and if at the same time things turn in such a way as to
leave no other and more urgent interest or exigency to take precedence
of this one and hinder its being pushed to an issue; then it should
reasonably follow that contention is due to arise between the unblest
mass on whose life it is a burden and the classes who live by it. But it
is, of course, impossible to state beforehand what will be the precise
line of cleavage or what form the division between the two parties in
interest will take. Yet it is contained in the premises that