be generally beneficent. As an isolated man working,
Crusoe-like, for himself alone, gains by every technical discovery he
can make and by everything he can add to his stock of productive
appliances, so society, the great and isolated organism which is the
tenant of our planet, reaps a benefit by every improvement it can
make, and the forces of distribution see to it that this benefit is
carried through and through the system and made to improve the
condition of the most humble members. Since the great areas of new
land are no longer available as a future resource, the hope of labor
during the coming centuries, under any form of industrial
organization, whether it be competitive or socialistic, rests on the
prospect of continued technical gains,--an unending succession of
calls on the exhaustless serving power of nature.

_The Effect of Changes in the Relative Amounts of Labor and
Capital._--The law of wages, as stated in an early chapter of this
work, makes it evident that an increase of population, while the
social fund of capital remains the same, would reduce the product of
marginal labor and therefore the rate of wages. In every establishment
into which more workmen should come, while its capital remained the
same in amount, the power of an individual worker to produce goods
would be lessened. Moreover, any influx of laborers into the society
as a whole would be attended by a diffusion of them among all the
groups and subgroups, so that the power of an individual laborer to
create any kind of goods would be reduced. This means that labor has
lost some of its power to create _commodity_, which is the concrete
name for general wealth, and its wages fall accordingly.

An influx of capital without any change in the number of laborers
would have the opposite effect. It would add to the productive power
of marginal labor. As the new capital should diffuse itself through
the producing organism it would enlarge the product of workers
everywhere. The wages of labor depend in part on a numerical ratio
between units of capital and units of labor, as they cooeperate in
production; and the change in the ratio which enlarging capital causes
improves the condition of the working people. The capital also
diffuses itself throughout the system, every subgroup gets a share of
it, and labor everywhere responds to this influence and produces more
than before. In a change in this ratio--in a gain of _per capita_
wealth in productive