hen we proposed to attain a similar static state for
the entire world, though the trouble would be less serious in degree.
In waiting long enough for population to distribute itself naturally,
we cut off influences that, within that period, will affect
production and distribution far more than the change in population
will affect them. In so far as Texas or any newly occupied region is
concerned, the changes thus precluded are those which would have
tended to reverse the effect of the redistribution of population.
Migrations from Belgium to Texas, if extensive and long continued,
would reduce the productive power of labor in Texas; while the dynamic
changes which will actually go on within any such period will increase
the productive power of that labor, and it is not certain whether the
one or the other influence will predominate. For the United States as
a whole it is probable that progress in the useful arts will more than
offset the influx of new laborers and give to wages a rising trend.
If, however, we establish the natural standard of wages by cutting off
such progress and letting the influx of labor continue, the test would
give a standard lower than the present one,--a false, as well as a
discouraging result. The resultant of all the changes we are about to
study will probably give to the future pay of labor in America a
rising trend.

_How Industries adapt themselves to Unequal Density of
Population._--In view of this fact it is necessary to recognize a
proximate rather than an ultimate static state as that toward which
the adjustments now going on are immediately tending. We will treat
the unequal density of population within our economic society as
something which will last, not forever, but so long that it will not
be removed or appreciably affected within the period required for the
other adjustments that we are studying. Given a population that is
dense in Belgium and sparse in Texas, and competition will cause the
industries to take on the types which they would have and retain if
that difference in density were destined to be permanent. The type
toward which the economic life of both regions is tending is thus a
proximate rather than an ultimate one. Each region will, in the near
future, be of the type toward which influences which do not involve an
equalization of population are impelling it. We get the true direction
of the change that is going on in the earning power of labor and in
the shape of the