To be a closer synonym for Economics, Business must deserve a definition relating its customs to natural Economic law (a subject to be considered in a later Lesson) and extending its functions more completely to universal mutual service. Moreover, its definition must widen the Business concept so as to include all kinds of such service. Business can no more exclude from its realm particular Business specialties, though that be customary, than it can include the operations of “confidence men,” as it is sometimes supposed to do. Its functions are not limited to commerce, nor to banking, nor to any other of those Business specialties to which careless speech, and sometimes snobbish thought, tend to narrow the meaning of the word.
Business is that function of social life which includes all serviceable specialties. Such terms as “commercial,” “mercantile,” “industrial,” “agriculture,” “labor,” “the professions,” and so on, denominate specializations or sections or subsidiary departments of Business, not Business as a whole. They are useful for subclassification; but, like all subclassifications, whether in Economics or in any other science, they are misleading when perverted into general terms for primary or fundamental or comprehensive categories. The term Business, like the term Economics, should include them all. Every kind of service necessitates busy-ness; and serviceable busy-ness, what is that but Business?
Considered comprehensively, then, and excluding parasitical adhesions, Business might be, as some advanced students of Economic phenomena suppose it to be, another name for Economics. In the scholastic sense, Economics is the more orthodox term; in the practical sense Business could better express the idea. Both terms might have practically the same meaning if considerately used. Honest Business, inclusive of all serviceable activities—service for service, to adopt a phrase in definition of Business—would be identical with Economics. Either, like the other, may be described superficially as the process of the science of making money.
Quite consistently with the foregoing survey, Economics has been described as the science of “mankind making a living.” This definition, too, excludes the solitary life by limiting Economic science to cooperative mankind—in other words, to Economic association. It, too, identifies Economics and legitimate Business; for only through legitimate Business activities can cooperative mankind make a living. It, too, excludes theft in all its forms and guises; for so much of a living as some may make by any kind of theft, others must lose as victims of theft. It, too, brings Economics on the surface and Business on the surface within the definition of “the science of making money;” for only by means of money measurements in money terms does or can mankind in the mass make its living.
But making money is only a surface fact in Economics. It is but a means to the end. By no possibility can it be rationally regarded as the ultimate object. The ultimate object of Economics is earning the living that money will buy. Both the object and the method lie below the surface of money-making. To Economics, making money is somewhat as book-keeping is to a commercial business. It is the surface expression of all underlying Economic phenomena.
Before those phenomena can be thoughtfully observed and studied, the relation to them of money-making must be keenly scrutinized and intelligently considered.
SECOND LESSON
MONEY
What is Money? and what are its functions? Money is the medium of trade, its denominations the language.
Resting on the surface of Economic phenomena, Money and Money terms spread over the whole of the Economic area. All subsurface phenomena in Economics are measured in trade by Money units; the details of trading transactions are discussed and recorded in Money terms.
Money terms vary with localities. In the United States, Money talks in terms of “dollars;” in Great Britain in terms of “pounds sterling;” in France in terms of “francs;” in Germany of “marks;” elsewhere in local terms too numerous for other than encyclopedic description. But the value measurements that Money makes of commodities in the processes of trade are everywhere, at any given time, practically the same.