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shareholders, or as many as there are adult males in New York city. Hence the great concerns which now constitute our capital enterprises, and which employ probably three-fourths of the labor of Great Britain, France, Germany, and America, could have no existence. For, as large forces of workmen practice a division of labor which small ones can not, so large capitals can effect a subdivision of their potency in the form of credit to many more persons, functions, and places than a small one. This increase in the potency of capital, through credit, magnifies much more rapidly than the capital. (A penniless adventurer who caused it to be believed that he had come over from England with five millions to loan, but had not, in fact, the means of paying a single hack hire, was enabled on this false credit to open a banking house in Wall Street, receive deposits, buy a country estate, horses and carriages, entertain largely, etc. His credit worked in all ways and directions.)

To subdivide capital is, in this sense, to destroy it. But without these banks, manufactories, shipping lines, mining enterprises, all commercial interchange and association among men, in the degree adequate to maintain existing industries and civilization, would be not only impeded but paralyzed. Equality would be annihilation. What the socialist describes as justice would be famine. The radically equalized mob would surrender to military force, in order that through an abject abnegation of its liberties it might begin again in social slavery, and thence emerge and return to its present condition of reciprocal helpfulness and mutual freedom.

79. How Distribution of Wealth Attends Its Cumulation, and Getting Rich Is Doing Good.-Is there any economic law which causes men to create and distribute the commodities of which others have need, and in so doing to distribute the price of the commodity back among its producers with that perfect equity which shall reward each according to his economic merit, but, if he fail of economic merit, shall still supply him according to his need?

Why should Chinamen interest themselves in carrying bales of tea, or raw silk, on their backs over the mountains, so that we may enjoy them? It is because the wage of his day's service comes to him at sundown, indirectly and through various bankers in advance, but ultimately, and very straightly, from those who will wear his silk and drink his tea. But for this distribution of wages to him, he would not be producing, but probably

fighting or hunting. A process of mutual obsequious service goes on hourly between strangers all over the world, commerce consisting of a duplex system in which commodities and services are going one way, and their equivalents are returning. As the commodities unite in the currents of transportation, they become great cargoes. As the payments divide in the return currents of distribution, they become as small as the finest atom of sugar that can be detected by the nerves of taste. Mr. Jevons happily states this law to be, that value is due to need, and declines with satiety, in each individual. Owing to the fact that his capacity to consume any one thing is very limited, while his capacity to produce many things is almost boundless, as is also his desire to possess the products of others, a decline, in the value of all he produces over his own need, can only be prevented by his forwarding the surplus to him who needs it most, such last named need being expressed economically by the value of the return service he is willing to render. As there is no limit to the degree in which one can desire the products of others' labor, so there can be no limit to the degree in which he shall be stimulated to produce, however small may be his capacity to consume the very thing he produces. Every commoodity declines in value in the degree that it exists in surplus at the point of production, but advances in value as it approaches him who most needs it. This law of declining and advancing values is the steam which propels the social mechanism. It is the involuntary philanthropic force which mainly feeds, shelters, clothes, employs, nerves, stimulates, educates, and governs the world, first in its industries, and then, where its industries fail to give relief, in its charities, which are as it were, its industries in the minor key. For charity is evolved among men because it is valued; it comes in obedience to demand. Where gifts are highly esteemed they are made; where effort for others is appreciated it is put forth. For all moral and religious, heroic, humane, and charitable effort results in a subtler and more spiritual form of profit, carrying with it an increase of social and spiritual capital and power, which to finer natures, is more regarded than money.

80. The Greater the Accumulations of Reproductive Wealth the More Equal the Diffusion of Enjoyable Wealth. To insure a complete and effective distribution of wealth among mankind, involves the expenditure of an enormous labor power, and the pressure of the most terrible persistency of

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motive. It is accomplished so perfectly that cases of physical suffering are extremely rare in all parts of the world, are usually associated with great imprudence or with stubborn vices, and are easily corrected by even a brief return to prudent ways. To insure this pressure of motive, wealth is divided into two kinds, one of which can be the object of only a limited avarice, and then immediately satiates, viz., enjoyable or consumable wealth, and the other of which, reproductive wealth, is the subject of custody and the means of social power, and can not be directly enjoyed.* So instinctively do all men assume this truth that to assume the opposite surprises us with a sense of humor.

Col. Ingersoll effects this surprise, which is of the essence of humor, when he says, "How absurd that a man who already has 1,000,000 neckties, of which he can only use one a day, should work all day to get another necktie." The absurdity consists in selecting as the object of avarice a form of consumable wealth, instead of those forms in which wealth may be stored for ostentation, as gold and diamonds, or by which it may be reproduced, as money, houses, lands, ships, banks, factories, machinery, etc. The passion of avarice can not be excited in favor of consumable wealth, except as it may constitute a merchant's stock of goods while it is in reproductive use. No miser works all day for another necktie, or apple, or orange. The passion of avarice can only be felt for those forms of wealth whose accumulation in large masses is a means of production, or of distribution, or of ostentation, or of security, or in some way ministers to more permanent wants than enjoyable wealth does, chiefly in the organization of society. The one might be called individual, pleasurable, sensational, transient, emotional, perishable wealth. The other is social, instrumental, indirect, reproductive, capitalistic wealth. Food, raiment, shelter, works of art, entertainment and instruction, music, books, pictures, etc., are enjoyable wealth, though all of them become reproductive capital when gathered in stocks for sale, and the more permanent of them approach reproductive wealth, and often cross and recross the boundaries. Power's "Eve" or Church's "Niagara," exhibited for an admis

* Prof. Henry Sidgwick ("Principles Political Economy," p. 86) says there is "need of a broad distinction between the two portions of a country's material wealth, which may be distinguished as consumer's wealth and producer's wealth respectively. By consumer's wealth I mean such material things as are directly available for satisfying human needs and desires, producer's wealth (and similarly of course producer's services) being only useful indirectly as a means of obtaining the former,"

sion fee, is reproductive wealth. Placed in a private residence it is an æsthetic and high grade of enjoyable wealth, useful, also, like goid or diamonds, for storing wealth, and resembling reproductive wealth in the fact that while the title to it may be private, its highest uses are social. Arms, factories, roads, and their means of conveyance, mines, ships, shops, stores, banks, machinery, money, are all reproductive wealth. Mankind are chiefly interested, both from the economic and the humane point of view, in a distribution of these several kinds of wealth in divers ways. Consumable commodities need to be so distributed that the capacity of each individual to consume, especially clothing, raiment, and shelter, shall be satisfied. Consumable wealth, when returning in payment for commodities, needs to be so distributed that each agent in production, capital, labor, land, skill in management, etc., shall be paid in proportion to the degree in which it aids production. Reproductive wealth, since it can not be directly enjoyed by the body, needs to be so allotted that mankind shall get its most abundant and effective use on the most economic terms and in the most convenient way.

The farmer's wheat is governed in value by the law of satiety. All that he and his family can not eat becomes worthless, except as he can send it to those who produce no wheat. The question, what distributive share of the price the farmer will get, depends on how much of the price which it sells for in New York or Massachusetts will have to be deducted for railway freight, and paid out for wages and rent of land, or interest on capital. This depends on the economic laws governing the use by society of reproductive wealth. One of the most important of these is that, the greater the accumulation and concentration of reproductive capital under a single control, the lower will be the rate per cent. at which society can get its use, and the greater will be the number and variety of the use, it will render.

Here, therefore, are two laws, both appealing to the same passion of gain, with equal potency but in opposite directions. The law of satiety, confined to consumable commodities, says to their owner, "Away with them to those who are in need, send them swiftest to where the want is greatest." The Law of Economy of Capital says, "The greater your capital the cheaper must its use be lent to the producers and consumers of consumable wealth." Society's interest, therefore, is in making consumable goods repulsive to the owner, producer, and capitalist the instant a supply sufficient for immediate need is obtained.

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But society's interest is also that the accumulation of reproductive wealth, which is mere control or management, and not consumption, shall go on under the sway of an ambition that is insatiable, until it results in a power larger than its owner has the capacity to use profitably-a fact which is both made known, and corrected, by the fact that he begins to invest unprofitably-therefore to lose on his investments, and thereby to disperse his capital.

The function of all reproductive wealth, i. e., wealth that earns or makes wealth, is either to create consumable commodities, as is done by the farmer, manufacturer, mechanic, artist, etc.; or to forward the consumable commodities as rapidly as possible to their consumers, as is done by ships, railways, carts, and wagons, steam-power, mule-power, porter-power; or to distribute the ownership, and subdivide the title to it, among all these consumers, as is done by merchants, traders, exporters, and middlemen; or to fix stable and uniform prices on commodities, so that profits and wages may be made steady, by steadying that surplus, of price over cost of production, out of which profits and wages arise, as is done by produce exchanges and boards of trade; or to receive from consumers and transmit to producers the returns or means of payment, as is done by banks, by coin, and by all agencies that issue money; or to distribute these means of payment among producers according to their several shares, as is done by the entrepreneur and capitalist in employing labor, hiring land and money, and paying out rent, wages, and interest; or to maintain order, observance of contracts, and integrity among all these interests, as is done by courts of law; or to create such a popular conscience, as will alleviate the cases of failure and suffering to which the industrial life is in exceptional cases subject, as is done by religious, masonic, co-operative, philanthropic, and benevolent agencies for aiding the bereaved, defective, delinquent, and unsuccessful classes.

Reproductive capital is to society, relative to consumable commodities, what the engines, tunnels, aqueducts, and water-pipes of a great city are relatively to the water which they bear to the thirsty, viz., means of forcing it from the point where it exists in surplus, and is therefore useless, to the million points where it is not only needed, but most needed, the degree of need being always certified in economics by the return of effort or price the supply will bring.

The question whether unequal diffusion of wealth is favorable to all the other interests of society as it is to production, whether