tells us how these forces work--tells us, in short, how wages,
interest, and true profits are, in and of themselves, determined. If
any man works and gets wages, that part of his income will be
determined by the wages law. If he furnishes capital, a second part of
his income will be determined by the interest law. If he also
cooerdinates labor and capital, whatever he may thus gain is determined
by the law of profit. Economic science has to ascertain and state what
these three laws are, though in its static division it has only to
account for two of them.

_Costs as well as Gains Apportioned._--The term _distribution_, as
commonly used, denotes a division of the gains of industry; but as we
have said, there are sacrifices which have to be borne in getting the
gains, and these also have to be shared. Wealth benefits men in the
using, but puts burdens upon them in the making; and when all society
does the making, it has to apportion, in some way, not only the
benefits but the burdens. We shall take account of these sacrifices
because of the relation that they bear to the gains. They act as an
ultimate check on production. Men would go on producing indefinitely
if the operation cost them nothing, since it would always be agreeable
to have a further income; but they necessarily encounter pains and
sacrifices that, sooner, or later, bring the enlargement of their
incomes to an end. Much that is of importance occurs at that critical
point where the sacrifices of production put an end to the extension
of it. It is the positive fruits of production that we have first to
consider; and what in this connection we wish first to know is how
wages and interest are determined when industry is carried on in a
social way and under a system of competition. We shall find that these
incomes are always tending toward standards which they would reach if
society were in the state which we have described as static. How they
are forced away from their standards by the changes and disturbances
of actual life, and how the standards themselves change with social
development, will be the subject of the latter part of this treatise.

CHAPTER VI

VALUE AND ITS RELATION TO DIFFERENT INCOMES

Functional distribution controls personal incomes since each man who
gets, in a normal way, any income at all performs one or more
productive functions, and his total income is the sum of the returns
for these several functions. Moreover under such a c