a discrepancy in price, between
purchase and sale, or between transactions which come to the same result
as purchase and sale, that the gains of business are drawn; and it is in
terms of price that these gains are rated, amassed and funded. It is
necessary, for a business concern to achieve a favorable balance in
terms of price; and the larger the balance in terms of price the more
successful the enterprise. Such a balance can not be achieved except by
due regard to the conditions of the market, to the effect that dealings
must not go on beyond what will yield a favorable balance in terms of
price between income and outgo. As has already been remarked above, the
prescriptive and indispensable recourse in all this conduct of business
is sabotage, limitation of supply to bring a remunerative price result.

The new dispensation offers two new factors bearing on this businesslike
need of a sagacious sabotage, or rather it brings a change of
coefficients in two factors already familiar in business management: a
greater need, for gainful business, of resorting to such limitation of
traffic; and a greater facility of ways and means for enforcing the
needed restriction. So, it is confidently to be expected that in the
prospective piping time of peace the advance in the industrial arts will
continue at an accelerated rate; which may confidently be expected to
affect the practicable increased production of merchantable goods; from
which it follows that it will act to depress the prices of these goods;
from which it follows that if a profitable business is to be done in the
conduct of productive industry a greater degree of continence than
before will have to be exercised in order not to let prices fall to an
unprofitable figure; that is to say, the permissible output must be held
short of the productive capacity of such industry by a wider margin than
before. On the other hand, it is well known out of the experience of the
past few decades that a larger coalition of invested capital,
controlling a larger proportion of the output, can more effectually
limit the supply to a salutary maximum, such as will afford reasonable
profits. And with the new dispensation affording a freer scope for
business enterprise on conditions of greater security, larger coalitions
than before are due to come into bearing. So that the means will be at
hand competently to meet this more urgent need of a stricter limitation
of the output, in spite of any i