In qualification of this broad proposition it is to be noted that, while the gains of the superior rank of businessmen accrue in the manner indicated,--by means of disturbances which may indifferently be favourable or unfavourable to industry,--yet in the long run it is necessarily true that the gains which so inure to the pecuniary magnates must be derived from the net product of industry and will in the long run be larger in the aggregate the more productive the community’s industry is. What makes business profitable to the businessmen is, after all, their usufruct of the community’s industrial efficiency. In the long run nothing can accrue as income to the pecuniary magnates more than the surplus product of industry above the subsistence of the industrial community at large. But so long as the magnates have not come to a working arrangement on this basis and “pooled their interests” the proposition as formulated above appears to be adequate to the facts,--that the gains of these larger businessmen are a function of the magnitude of the disturbances which they create rather than of their productive effect. It should also follow, and so far as the above characterisation holds it does follow, that the current pecuniary organisation of industry vests the usufruct of the community’s industrial proficiency in the owners of the industrial equipment. Proximately this usufruct of the industrial community’s technological knowledge and working capacity vests in the detail owners of the equipment, but only proximately. At the further remove it vests only in the businessmen whose command of large means enables them to create and control those pecuniary conjunctures of industry that bring about changes in the market value and ownership of the equipment. FOOTNOTES [1] Cf. Jacques Loeb, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology_, ch. i. [2] Cf. W. James, _Principles of Psychology_, ch. xxiv and xxv, where, however, the difference between tropism and instinct is not kept well in hand,--the tropisms having at that date not been subjected to inquiry and definition as has been true since then; William McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_, ch. i. [3] Loeb, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain_, pp. 177–178. [4] Cf. Graham Wallas, _Human Nature in Politics_, especially ch. i. [5] Cf., e. g., James, _Principles of Psychology_, ch. xxiv; William McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_, ch. iii. [6] Loeb, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain_, especially ch. xiii.