unted. The man who digs iron ore contributes to
the making of bridges, rails, locomotives, buildings, machines, ships,
and tools in indefinite number and variety. The price of each of the
articles into which any of this material goes contains in itself the
price of that part of the raw material which goes into it. There is
steel in a ship, and the maker of that part of the output of raw steel
which goes into a ship gets his pay from the price of the vessel; and
so with the crude metal which goes into a bridge, a building, an
engine, etc. What the producer of a material gets from each source
tends, under perfectly free competition, to equal in amount what he
contributes toward the value of the corresponding article. In terms of
our table a miner may furnish ore from which iron is taken for the
making of both A''' and B'''; and if so, when the distributive process
analyzes these products into their elements, the value of what he has
in each case contributed will fall to him. He will be paid according
to the help he has afforded in the making of the A''' and the B''',
and this fact does not change in principle the manner in which the
income of society is divided. If the man helped to make only one
thing, he would get a part of the price of that one thing; but if he
helps to make several, he will get a part of the price of each of
them. Each group has one grand function to perform, such as the making
of an A''', and if the man helps in more than one, and is paid
accordingly, his total pay is according to the amount he produces in
all the different functions he performs, and the principle of
distribution works as perfectly as it would if the man were confined
to the single subgroup A. For simplicity we assume that he is so.

_The Functions of Capitalist, Laborer, and Entrepreneur often
performed by One Person._--One person may perform several functions,
not only by contributing to the products of several groups, but by
contributing in more than one way to the product of one subgroup. He
may, for example, both labor and furnish capital, and he may, further,
perform a special cooerdinating function which is not labor, in the
technical sense, and scarcely involves any continuous personal
activity at all, but is essential for rendering labor and capital
productive. What this function is we shall presently see. We shall
term it the function of the _entrepreneur_, using this term in an
unusually strict way. We shall keep this func