ernly rebuked the producer.

In the same way the technical form and mechanism of production were
presumed to respond to an automatic stimulus. Inventions and improved
processes met their own reward. Labor, so it was argued, was perpetually
being saved by the constant introduction of new uses of machinery.

By a parity of reasoning, the shares received by all the participants
and claimants in the general process of production were seen to be
regulated in accordance with natural law. Interest on capital was
treated merely as a particular case under the general theory of price.
It was the purchase price needed to call forth the "saving" (a form, so
to speak, of production) which brought the capital into the market. The
"profits" of the employer represented the necessary price paid by
society for his services, just enough and not more than enough to keep
him and his fellows in operative activity, and always tending under the
happy operation of competition to fall to the minimum consistent with
social progress.

Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather
peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost.
But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent
emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It
did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither
greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and
its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the
classical economist; the fixed conviction that what a man owns is his
own created a mist through which the light could not pass.

Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for
labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply
of labor represented by the existing and increasing working class.
Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was
argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours
were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what
was coming to him." All possibility of a general increase of wages
depended on the relation of available capital to the numbers of the
working men.

Thus the system as applied to society at large could be summed up in the
consoling doctrine that every man got what he was worth, and was worth
what he got; that industry and energy brought their own reward; that
national wealth and ind