ference that the limit of competitive expenditures would be
rather higher than at present, to answer to the greater available margin
of product that could be devoted to this use; and that the competing
concerns would be somewhat more numerous, or at least that the aggregate
expenditure on competitive enterprise would be somewhat larger; as,
e.g., costs of advertising, salesmanship, strategic litigation,
procuration of legislative and municipal grants and connivance, and the
like.

It is always conceivable, though it may scarcely seem probable, that
these incidents of increased pressure of competition in business traffic
might eventually take up all the slack, and leave no net margin of
product over what is available under the less favorable conditions of
industry that prevail today; more particularly when this increased
competition for business gains is backed by an increased pressure of
competitive spending for purposes of a reputable appearance. All this
applies in retail trade and in such lines of industry and public service
as partakes of the nature of retail trade, in the respect that
salesmanship and the costs of salesmanship enter into their case in an
appreciable measure; this is an extensive field, it is true, and
incontinently growing more extensive with the later changes in the
customary methods of marketing products; but it is by no means anything
like the whole domain of industrial business, and by no means a field in
which business is carried on without interference of a higher control
from outside its own immediate limits.

All this generously large and highly expensive and profitable field of
trade and of trade-like industry, in which the businessmen in charge
deal somewhat directly with a large body of customers, is always subject
to limitations imposed by the condition of the market; and the condition
of the market is in part not under the control of these businessmen, but
is also in part controlled by large concerns in the background; which in
their turn are after all also not precisely free agents; in fact not
much more so than their cousins in the retail trade, being confined in
all their motions by the constraint of the price-system that dominates
the whole and gathers them all in its impersonal and inexorable net.

There is a colloquial saying among businessmen, that they are not doing
business for their health; which being interpreted means that they are
doing business for a price. It is out of