c. 4. Ascending from the business-unit to the larger unit in the
structure of industry, the Market, or groups of directly competing
businesses, we find similar changes have taken place. In considering
these changes the relation between Market and Trade should be clearly
grasped. The mere fact that two persons or groups of persons in
different places are engaged in similar processes of production, that
is to say, belong to the same trade, has no significance for us. The
trade or aggregate of productive units of a particular sort receives
industrial unity only in so far as there is competition of the units
in buying the raw materials, tools, and labour for carrying on their
trade, and in selling the results of their activity. Weavers of cotton
goods in Central China belong to the same trade as weavers in
Lancashire, and conduct their craft with similar implements to those
which still prevail in the cottage industries of France and Germany,
but such competition as may exist between them is so indirect and
slight that it may be neglected in considering industrial structure.
It is in the competition of a market that businesses meet and are
vitally related. In a trade there may be several markets whose
connection is distant and indirect. Market is the name given to a
number of directly competing businesses. "Economists understand by the
term market not any particular market-place in which things are bought
and sold, but the whole of any region in which buyers and sellers are
in such free intercourse with one another that the prices of the same
goods tend to equalise easily and quickly."[111]

A single competitive price is then the essential feature and the test
of a market. Businesses in such close relation with one another that
the prices at which they buy and sell are the same, or differ only by
reason of and in correspondence with certain local advantages or
disadvantages, are members of a single market. The money market is a
single market throughout the world. The price of money in London,
Rome, Rio de Janeiro, may differ, but this difference will correspond
to certain differences of risk. There will be a tendency towards a
single price, or, putting the case in other words, wherever in the
world L100 of money represents the same commodity the same price will
be paid for its use, while any difference in its value as a commodity
will be accurately reflected in the difference of price.

Absolute freedom of intercourse is no