date, a shape that conforms in some degree to the one
which, under the conditions existing at that date, the static forces
acting alone would give to it. It is even true that, as long as
competition is free, the most active societies conform most closely to
their static models. If we could check the five radical changes that
are going on in a society that is very full of energy,--if, as it
were, we could stop such an organism midway in its career of rapid
growth and let it lapse into a stationary condition,--the shape that
it would take would be not radically unlike the one which it had when
we interposed the check on its progress. Taking on the theoretically
static form would not strikingly alter its actual shape. The actual
form of a highly dynamic society hovers relatively near to its static
model though it never conforms to it. In the case of sluggish
societies this would not be true; for if in one of them we stopped the
forces of growth and waited long enough to let the static influences
produce their full effects, the shape to which they would bring the
organism would be very different from the one which it actually had
when its slow progress was brought to a stop. Most efficient in the
most changeful societies are forces which, if they were acting by
themselves alone, would produce a changeless state. The reasons for
this will later appear.

_Differences between Static Forms of Society at Different Dates._--A
highly dynamic condition, then, is one in which the economic organism
changes rapidly and yet, at any time in the course of its changes, is
relatively near to a certain static model. It is clear, therefore,
that it cannot, at different periods, conform even approximately to
one single model. If the forces of change which in 1800 were impelling
the industrial society of America to a forward movement had been
suppressed, and if competition had been ideally free and active, that
society would before long have settled into the shape then required by
the forces which, in the preceding chapters, we have described. Some
labor would have moved from certain occupations to others and gained
by the change; and this movement of labor would have ended by making
the productive power and the pay of a unit of this agent uniform in
all the different subgroups of the system. Capital would have so
apportioned itself as to level out inequalities in its earning power.
The profits of _entrepreneurs_ would have been equalized by