Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/53

, i.e. a “surplus” element. This “surplus,” corresponding to re rent for land, had no rational or equitable basis: it was an element of “unreason” permeating the bargaining process in all markets, either for consumption goods, production goods, or productive services.

The crude and commonly accepted notion that the general result of the current competitive system was to place the benefits of competition in the hands of “the consumer,” and that, since everybody is a consumer, all improvements of productivity ultimately benefited consumers as a body, was thus put into the scrap-heap, and there began to emerge the view that economic “force” was a main determinant in the distribution of wealth. This argument in its entirety was set out in my book The Economics of Distribution, published in 1900 by The Macmillan Company of New York. This publication was unfortunate, in so much as it reached few English readers and was scarcely noticed in English reviews.

There was little attempt at the time to associate the definitely humanist and ethical trend of my Ruskinian thought with this analysis of the economic processes of distribution. It was not until a later period that the two trends of thought were correlated. This postponement was partly due to the absorption of much of my time and energy in movements and events which brought me into touch with the more active reformers of the nineties.