social
organism much as though it were as isolated and self-contained as
would be an inaccessible island with its population. It has one
general market where values are fixed. A farmer within the area
covered by our studies produces wheat for the whole society, and in
one way or another, every person within the area is a bidder for it. A
shoemaker makes shoes and a weaver makes cloth to offer to everybody.
Each part of the organism ministers to the whole and is ministered to
by the whole. Competition is ideally free and in a sense is universal.
The general system of groups made up of the A's, the B's, the C's, and
the H's of our table illustrates the manner in which this complete and
self-contained society is organized. In the static state there is one
standard of wages for all these groups and their subdivisions and one
equally general standard of interest. The price of a commodity,
barring some allowance for cost of carrying it, is uniform everywhere.
A reduced price for _A'''M_ in any part of the area where this society
dwells would set men bidding for it from every quarter of that area
and would thus bring the local prices to uniformity. So a high rate of
pay for labor in one part would at once lure men from every other part
and reduce the high pay to the standard generally prevailing. The
picture is that of a social body having a large geographical extension
and yet intensely sensitive at every point to economic influences.
Prices, wages, and interest everywhere respond at once to an influence
that originates in any part of the extended area. In technical terms
this means that there is perfect mobility of labor and capital within
the group system represented by the table, and that this involves
equally perfect mobility as between parts of the area that the groups
inhabit. Men move from one section of the country to another in
response to an economic inducement as readily as they do from the
group _A_ to the group _B_.

_Barriers which divide the World into Economic Sections._--Now it is
clear that in the actual world changing one's place of abode is
difficult, and even sending capital from place to place is somewhat
so. Inequalities of earning power are not leveled out by a quick
migration of laborers from China to Europe or to America. In their
methods of production the different regions are not brought to a
uniformity, for there is machine labor here and hand labor there; and
it is vain to expect that machines w