Accident, or good fortune as it is called, may have the same effect as a monopoly or a secret process. Take the pearl-fishery, for instance. The value of the pearls obtained will be determined by dividing the whole amount procured in one day by the whole number of divers employed during that day; and by dividing the quantity obtained in the whole season by the number of days in that season; thus ascertaining the average cost of the pearls in labor. But the business is a mere lottery: one diver may bring up, from his first plunge, a pearl worth a hundred dollars; another may dive for a week, and obtain little or nothing. If a capitalist should undertake the business, and pay fixed wages to all the divers on condition of receiving all the pearls which they found, his profits, or the value of the pearls, would evidently be determined by their average cost in labor, and not by individual and extraordinary cases. When Mr. Senior, who denies that labor is essential to the creation of wealth, asks triumphantly, "If, while carelessly lounging along the, sea-shore, I were to pick up a pearl, would it have no value?" and, "Supposing that aerolites consisted of gold, would they have no value?" he might be answered, that accidents and miraculous events are supposed to be eliminated when we are reasoning upon the general principles which govern ordinary events; and that, if pearls were common enough to be often found by loungers on the sea-shore, or if showers of golden aerolites were so frequent as no longer to appear miraculous, certainly both the pearls and the gold would have little or no value.

I have dwelt at length upon the two fundamental maxims of Political Economy, that labor is the source of wealth, and that the wealth produced is in exact proportion to the labor expended, and is therefore measured by it; because, obvious and unquestionable as these truths may appear, they are yet such as the world is slow to recognize and reluctant to act upon. Here in America, especially, too many people spend their time and waste their substance upon vain projects for getting rich without labor. They hope that some one of those accidents, or peculiar circumstances, which we have noticed as occasionally disturbing the regular proportion of value to labor, may fall to their lot: that is, for it amounts to nothing else, that they may become rich at the expense of their fellows; that they may, by some invention, or per

haps some roguery, be able to exchange four days' labor for ten days' labor. They will take shares in a copper-mine, or go to California to dig gold, or commit any other extravagance, though it should be demonstrated to them that the average return, the whole profit divided by the whole number of adventurers, would not keep one from starvation.

Take another instance. Three persons out of four, when the temptation is brought home to them, will buy a ticket in a lottery; though this is the only adventure ever offered to the public, in which, avowedly, the net result is not a gain, but a loss. For $ 120,000 received as the price of tickets, perhaps $100,000 are returned in prizes; that is, the adventurers expect that only five sixths of what they have invested will be returned to them, instead of getting back the whole and a profit besides. And the $100,000 returned are divided into so few prizes that nineteen out of twenty of the ticket-holders must suffer a total loss of their investment. But one fortunate person one out of 60,000

must receive $ 20,000 for two invested. And yet lotteries are so popular that they must be forbidden by law, in order to prevent clerks from robbing their employers for the sake of investing money in them.

Coming back to the subject of the co-operation and the compensation of labor, it may be remarked, that the seemingly complex and difficult process of dividing the ultimate value of the finished article equitably among all those who have had a share in its pròduction, is really accomplished with ease, through the number of exchanges it undergoes at the different stages of its manufacture. At each stage, labor effects a change in its form, bringing it nearer to the state in which it is fitted for consumption; at each exchange, therefore, it has more labor vested in it, and consequently buys more labor vested in other products, the difference being the compensation of the last person who has made an alteration of its form.

What regulates this difference, and causes each producer to be paid in exact proportion to the labor which he has bestowed, is the competition of other producers. Wheat, for instance, is first sold or exchanged as wheat, the price paid for it being the compensation of the farmer by whose care and labor it was raised. As labor is the measure of value, a quantity of wheat which repre

sents five days' labor must be exchangeable for a quantity of cloth which also represents five days' labor, no more and no less; no more, because this would induce the cloth-maker to turn farmer; no less, because the farmer would then turn cloth-maker. No man will give six days' labor in any one product for another product which he might himself raise in five days.

It may be said, that he who has long practised a particular trade or art will be reluctant to exchange it for another, as he would thereby sacrifice the skill which he has obtained by experience, and be obliged to serve another apprenticeship to a new handicraft or profession. But it must be remembered, that employments can be kept full only by a succession of young and fresh hands constantly entering them; and these persons will choose, of course, the occupation that is most profitable. Thus the number of those who pursue the art which is underpaid will rapidly diminish, while the number in the more profitable branches of industry will increase, until an equality of gains among all these branches is re-established.

Exchanges then regulate themselves, and must be made on equal terms. The farmer having received a fair compensation for his work, the miller next obtains the wheat, and, having converted it into flour, sells it to the flour-merchant at an advanced price, because more labor is now vested in it. In like manner, it passes successively into the hands of the retail dealer, the baker, and the consumer, at each stage acquiring an additional value in exchange just sufficient to compensate, on an average, the labor expended upon it at that stage.

Competition, then, when it is free, or competition modified by custom, determines the distribution of the value of a product among those who have concurred in its production. How far it. may be modified by custom depends on circumstances. Mr. Mill justly observes, that competition has become "the governing principle of contracts only at a comparatively modern period"; and that "the relations, more especially, between the land-owner and the cultivator, and the payments made by the latter to the former, are, in all stages of society but the most modern, determined by the usage of the country." It was thus that, in many European countries, the serfs were gradually elevated, first into the condition of free tenants, and finally of absolute owners of the

THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH.

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soil. Their original obligation, to furnish to their lords an indefinite amount of provisions and labor, was first transformed into a definite payment of a fixed amount of either; these payments in kind were next commuted for payments in money, which were established by custom at so early a period, and therefore at so small an amount, that they became mere quit-rents; and the land was finally ransomed even from these quit-rents by commutation on reasonable terms, so that the former serfs became absolute proprietors of the ground.

While the peasantry in most countries of Continental Europe were thus not only emancipated, but secured from want by the ownership of the ground which they formerly tilled as slaves, the agricultural laborers of England were far less fortunate. All landed property in England was equally of feudal origin; that is, the land was admitted to belong originally to the state; and the immediate vassals of the crown, or the tenants in capite, held it only on condition of rendering certain services and payments, that might be considered as rent. Just so, the practice of sub-infeudation being introduced, these vassals of the crown parcelled out their respective lands to a set of inferior tenants, many of whom were originally serfs, on condition, first, of certain services and supplies being rendered; next, of a definite payment in kind; and then, of an ordinary money rent. Thus the inferior tenantry were the vassals of the great landholder, in the same manner, and upon the same terms, upon which the latter was a vassal of the crown, both being still called tenants in the language of the law. As the prerogatives of the crown were gradually diminished, and the liberties of the people increased, the nobility and landed gentry, the original tenants in chief, gradually lessened the feudal burdens upon their land, which consisted in services and payments, and finally, in Charles the Second's time, shook off the remnant of them altogether, artfully exchanging what had become a mere land-tax for an excise on beer and ale. Thus they became absolute owners of their holdings or tenements. But they had no disposition to make the same concessions to their own tenantry, which they had themselves exacted from the crown. The English peasantry have not been able to retain their lands, even on condition of paying the full original rent for them. They have subsided into the class of tenants at will, ground down by rack-rents for a

century or two, and at last expelled from the land altogether, to find their subsistence where they may. The feudal dues from the lands of the tenants in chief were slowly transformed into a species of land-tax, and at last abrogated entirely; while the same dues from the lands of the inferior tenantry were transformed into annual rents, augmented in amount by every increase in the value of the land; and when the peasants, from misfortune or bad management, could no longer pay them, they were ejected from the estate altogether, and became mere laborers for wages, or paupers.

The effect of custom in modifying competition has also been seen in Ireland, where the custom of what is called tenant-right has sprung up, prevailing almost universally in the north, and gradually extending itself into the centre and west of that unhappy country. "My view of tenant-right," says Mr. Senior, "is, that it is the difference between the rent actually charged by the landlord according to the custom of the country [which is a sort of quit-rent], and the utmost competition value [which is rack-rent]. In some cases, it is said to be founded on improvements made by the tenant on his farm, the beneficial effects of which are not exhausted, so that the outgoing tenant claims a right to sell them. The landlords, most of whom are absentees, and therefore unable to watch and know the changes which time produces on the annual value of their estates, have so long received an unvarying sum as the rent of each farm, and each farm has remained so long in the possession of one tenant, that the customary rent, or quitrent, is now considered as all which the landlord is entitled to receive; and whatever the land is really worth beyond this sum accrues to the benefit of the tenant. If this tenant wishes to quit the holding, custom gives him the right to sell what we should call "the good-will of the farm" for his own benefit; that is, the incoming tenant pays his predecessor a handsome bonus for the privilege of taking the farm on the old fixed rent, which is now much below the annual value of the ground. An enterprising landlord sometimes buys up this "right" for himself, in order that he may once again enter into full possession of his property.

Custom is here seen modifying the full effect of competition on the price of land, because the farm is not actually let to the highest bidder; and it often has equal influence on the prices of other commodities. Among the publishers of books, for example, the