is capital;
3. The wages of all the employees and contractors. Further, as large a
profit as possible must be realized.

The financial shrewdness and rapacity of property is worthy of
admiration. Each different name which increase takes affords the
proprietor an opportunity to receive it,--1. In the form of interest; 2.
In the form of profit. For, it says, a part of the income derived
from manufactures consists of interest on the capital employed. If
one hundred thousand francs have been invested in a manufacturing
enterprise, and in a year's time five thousand francs have been received
therefrom in addition to the expenses, there has been no profit, but
only interest on the capital. Now, the proprietor is not a man to labor
for nothing. Like the lion in the fable, he gets paid in each of his
capacities; so that, after he has been served, nothing is left for his
associates.

_Ego primam tollo, nominor quia leo.
Secundam quia sum fortis tribuctis mihi.
Tum quia plus valeo, me sequetur tertia.
Malo adficietur, si quis quartam tetigerit._

I know nothing prettier than this fable.

"I am the contractor. I take the first share.
I am the laborer, I take the second.
I am the capitalist, I take the third.
I am the proprietor, I take the whole."

In four lines, Phaedrus has summed up all the forms of property.

I say that this interest, all the more then this profit, is impossible.

What are laborers in relation to each other? So many members of a large
industrial society, to each of whom is assigned a certain portion of
the general production, by the principle of the division of labor and
functions. Suppose, first, that this society is composed of but three
individuals,--a cattle-raiser, a tanner, and a shoemaker. The social
industry, then, is that of shoemaking. If I should ask what ought to be
each producer's share of the social product, the first schoolboy whom I
should meet would answer, by a rule of commerce and association, that it
should be one-third. But it is not our duty here to balance the rights
of laborers conventionally associated: we have to prove that, whether
associated or not, our three workers are obliged to act as if they
were; that, whether they will or no, they are associated by the force of
things, by mathematical necessity.

Three processes are required in the manufacture of shoes,--the rearing
of cattle, th