is same analysis, to earn its rent in just the same way. The high rent
of a Broadway store, says the economist, does not add a single cent to
the price of the things sold in it. It is because prices are what they
are that the rent is and can be paid. Hence on examination the same
canon of social justice that covers and explains prices, wages, and
interest applies with perfect propriety to rent.

Or finally, to take the strongest case of all, one may, as a citizen,
feel apprehension at times at the colossal fortune of a Carnegie or a
Rockefeller. For it does seem passing strange that one human being
should control as property the mass of coin, goods, houses, factories,
land and mines, represented by a billion dollars; stranger still that at
his death he should write upon a piece of paper his commands as to what
his surviving fellow creatures are to do with it. But if it can be
shown to be true that Mr. Rockefeller "made" his fortune in the same
sense that a man makes a log house by felling trees and putting them one
upon another, then the fortune belongs to Mr. Rockefeller in the same
way as the log house belongs to the pioneer. And if the social
inferences that are drawn from the theory of natural liberty and natural
value are correct, the millionaire and the landlord, the plutocrat and
the pioneer, the wage earner and the capitalist, have each all the right
to do what he will with his own. For every man in this just world gets
what is coming to him. He gets what he is worth, and he is worth what he
gets.

But if one knocks out the keystone of the arch in the form of a
proposition that natural value conforms to the cost of production, then
the whole edifice collapses and must be set up again, upon another plan
and on another foundation, stone by stone.

_IV.--Work and Wages_

WAGES and prices, then, if the argument recited in the preceding chapter
of this series holds good, do not under free competition tend towards
social justice. It is not true that every man gets what he produces. It
is not true that enormous salaries represent enormous productive
services and that humble wages correspond to a humble contribution to
the welfare of society. Prices, wages, salaries, interest, rent and
profits do not, if left to themselves, follow the simple law of natural
justice. To think so is an idle dream, the dream of the quietist who may
slumber too long and be roused to a rude awakening or perish, perhaps,
in his sle