ill, by the
help of a gigantic commissariat, performing functions incomparably more
complex than were ever needed for military purposes? The answer
supposes that there is, as a matter of fact, a great industrial
organisation which discharges the various functions of producing,
exchanging, distributing, and so forth; and that its mutual relations
are just as capable of being investigated and stated as the relations
between different parts of an army. The men and officers do not wear
uniforms; they are not explicitly drilled or subject to a definite code
of discipline; and their rates of pay are not settled by any central
authority. But there are capitalists, "undertakers" and labourers,
merchants and retail dealers and contractors, and so forth, just as
certainly as there are generals and privates, horse, foot, and
artillery; and their mutual relations are equally definable. The
economist has to explain the working of this industrial mechanism; and
the thought may sometimes occur to us, that it is strange that he
should find the task so difficult. Since we ourselves have made, or at
any rate constitute, the mechanism, why should it be so puzzling to
find out what it is? We are cooperating in a systematic production and
distribution of wealth, and we surely ought not to find any
impenetrable mystery in discovering what it is that we are doing every
day of our lives. Certain economists writing within this century have
often been credited with the discovery of the true theory of rent, or,
which is equally good for my purpose, of starting a false theory. Yet
landowners and agents had been letting farms and houses for
generations; and surely they ought to have known what it was that they
were themselves doing. One explanation of the difficulty is, that
whereas an army is constituted by certain regulations of a central
authority, the industrial army has grown up unconsciously and
spontaneously. Its multitudinous members have only looked each at his
own little circle; the labourer only thinks of his wages, and the
capitalist of his profits, without considering his relations to the
whole system of which he forms a part. The peasant drives his plough
for wages, and buys his tea as if the tea fell like manna from the
skies, without thinking of the curious relation into which he is thus
brought with the natives of another hemisphere. The order which results
from all these independent activities appeared to the older economists
as