This technological infirmity of the businessmen assuredly does not arise from a lack of interest in industry, since it is only out of the net product of industry that the business community’s gains are drawn--except so far as they are substantially gains of accountancy merely, due to an inflation of values. Perhaps no class of men have ever been more keenly alert in their interest in industrial matters than the modern businessmen; and this interest extends not only to the industrial ventures in which they may for the time be pecuniarily “interested,” but also and necessarily to other lines of industry that are more or less closely correlated with the one in which the given businessman’s fortunes are embarked; for under modern market conditions any given line of industrial enterprise is bound in endless relations of give and take with all the rest. But this unremitting attention of businessmen to the affairs of industry is a business attention, and, so far as may be, it touches nothing but the pecuniary phenomena connected with the ownership of industry; so that it comes rather to a training in the art of keeping in touch with the pecuniary run of business affairs while avoiding all undue intimacy with the technological facts of industry,--undue in the sense of being in excess of what may serve the needs of a comprehensive short-term outlook over market relations, and which would therefore divert attention from this main interest and befog the pecuniary logic by which businessmen are governed. Probably, also, no class of men have ever bent more unremittingly to their work than the modern business community. Within the business community there is properly speaking no leisure class, or at least no idle class. In this respect there is a notable contrast between the business community and the landed interest. What there is to be found in this modern culture in the way of an idle class, considered as an institution, runs back for its origins and its specific traits to a more archaic cultural scheme; it is a survival from an earlier (predatory) phase of the pecuniary culture. In the nature of things an idle life of fashion is an affair of the nobility (gentry), of predatory antecedents and, under current conditions, of predatory-parasitic habits; and as regards those modern rich men who withdraw from the business community and fall into a state of _otium cum dignitate_, it is commonly their fortune to be assimilated by a more or less ceremonial induction into the body of this quasi-predatory gentry or nobility and so assume an imitative colouring of archaism.