As for our second problem, namely as to how the price of the products of Land, Capital, and Labour, is to be apportioned between the landlords, capitalists, and wage-earners, respectively, and by what law, if any, this is to be determined, I know of no work in connection with which this problem has been better discussed than in Professor Clark's 'Distribution of Wealth,' inasmuch as he has carried the statical and marginal method to the farthest point it has yet reached. Professor Clark inherits the tendency which is so characteristic of the best American authors in every department of thought, of keeping his eye firmly fixed on practical realities and their relations, rather than on abstractions; and with the changes going on in America on the great scale in the methods of industrial development - as seen in the organization of the great Trusts, etc., - as an ever present object-lesson, he has been enabled to shake himself quite free from the fallacies of the orthodox school of Mill and Ricardo, and so far as their doctrines are concerned may be said not to belong to the orthodox school of economists at all.

But like all the other academical economists of recent years whom we have passed under review, he has been hooked by the subtle bait of these 'statical marginal' theories of Jevons and his pupils of the English and Austrian schools; and imagines, like Walker and Marshall, that he can get a valid law of the distribution of wealth by cutting off at a stroke all the dynamical differentiating elements at the start, and reducing the problem to a purely statical one; - first by keeping each factor, or instrument of production, entering into the product, namely Land. Capital, and Labour, separate from the rest; and secondly, by reducing these factors each to a series of homogeneous units stretched out like the homogeneous hypothetical points of a mathematical line; the last, or 'marginal' one, of these points, being the one which is to determine the share of all other units entering into that particular factor - whether it be Land, Capital, or Labour and so yielding the statical law of distribution of which he is in search.

After which, he proposes in a second volume, not yet published, to work in those dynamical elements which he has purposely excluded from the narrower statical presentation which he has given us in this first volume, in the hope that when these dynamical complications have been added to or superimposed on the statical, the result of the union will be a formula or law which can be depended on to hold true of the distribution of wealth as it actually exists. In the meantime and so far as he has gone, the result he has arrived at from his purely statical study is, that under perfectly free competition, the rent of all land, the interest of all capital, and the wages of all labour tend to be equal to that part of the produce which is separately to be attributed to the 'marginal' landlord, the 'marginal' capitalist, and the 'marginal' wage-earner respectively; whereby it comes about, as he puts it, that "the product and its pay are identical." But as the dynamical elements which, like another Caligula, he has felt himself obliged to cut off at a single stroke before he begins, in order to arrive at this simple law, are no less important than the following: - (1) the increase of population, (2) the increase of capital, (3) improvements in the methods of production, (4) the substitution of combination for competition, and (5) the amount of consumption, it seems more than probable that when he comes to add them to, or otherwise work them into his simple statical law, their effects on this law will, like the simple formula of ' liberty, fraternity, and equality,' with which Rousseau was to regenerate the political world, end not in a modification of his statical law merely, but in its entire revolution! But as it would be as impertinent as it would be unfair for me to criticise here his preliminary statement of the law before he has given his own full expression to it - and especially as my criticism would have to be made from my own purely dynamical point of view, - I would venture to commend to those readers who may desire to see a current criticism of it from his own standpoint, Mr. Hobson's detailed criticism in the 'Journal of Political Economy ' for September, 1904 - a criticism with which I entirely agree, and to which I can add nothing worthy of being inserted here.

But one prediction I will permit myself to make, and it is this; - that when Professor Clark's new volume on the dynamics of Distribution does appear, he will either have to start by wiping out as with a sponge all he has written, and begin afresh from a purely dynamical standpoint, or else he will leave the problem of Distribution in a more hopeless confusion than when he began his labours. For the problem being, as I have attempted to show throughout this book, essentially a dynamical one, the statical elements must be subordinated to the dynamical from the start; but as Professor Clark, like all the academical economists, believes it to be essentially a statical problem, though with dynamical variants and accompaniments which have to be allowed for afterwards, the consequence is that instead of a dynamical wheel moving amid fluid homogeneous conditions, he starts with the homogeneous conditions - free competition, unlimited quantities of the different instruments of production, and unlimited freedom in their movements - but with nothing whatever in the nature of a dynamical construction, either of a wheel or anything else, to move in them! And the conclusion he deduces from it all, so far, is as we should expect, that no factor, - no instrument of production, whether Land or Capital or Labour, - can get any advantage over the others; that there will be no exploited surpluses got by one out of the others, no scarcity rents, no monopoly prices from combinations and Trusts, no exploitation of wage-earners (owing to a modified form of Von Thunen's 'law of substitution' being everywhere in evidence), and in a word, no injustice in the existing distribution of wealth at all; but each will get what it earns, neither more nor less, - 'the product and the pay being identical.'

And now, in closing this chapter, if I am asked in turn by the reader what my own theory of Distribution, as seen from a purely dynamic standpoint, is, I will answer in a word, as before; - There is no law of Distribution as such at all, but only "the good old rule, the simple plan, that he shall take who has the power, and he shall keep who can;" - that is to say, that the distribution of wealth is a matter of the relative economic powers of those who own the instruments of production, - the landlords, the capitalists, and the wage earners - at any given time and place; that it is a contest between these living dynamic powers and these only; and that the one which has the 'pull' over the others, whether from economic situation, economic combination, or what not, will take the lion's share of the produce as in war; the rest having to take the leavings; - whether those who have the power be the landlords, as was the case in England before the repeal of the Corn Laws; or the capitalists, as the great Trust magnates in America; or the wage-earners, as in Australia and New Zealand - modified of course and mitigated everywhere by the free play of competition on the margins and fringes, and in the interstices between each; as when prosperous workmen turn themselves into little capitalists or little capitalists go back to their trades; or when the army of small retailers compete with each other for customers; - but nothing more.