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144 40 per cent and Harry's share at 35 per cent is to fix Tom's share at 25 per cent.

But between the laws of the distribution of wealth, as laid down in the standard works, there is no such relation. If we fish them out and bring them together, we find them to be as follows:

Wages are determined by the ratio between the amount. of capital devoted to the payment and subsistence of labor and the number of laborers seeking employment.

Rent is determined by the margin of cultivation; all lands yielding as rent that part of their produce which exceeds what an equal application of labor and capital could procure from the poorest land in use.

Interest is determined by the equation between the demands of borrowers and the supply of capital offered by lenders. Or (if we take what is given as the law of profits) it is determined by wages, falling as wages rise and rising as wages fall—or, to use the phrase of Mill, by the cost of labor to the capitalist.

The bringing together of these current statements of the laws of the distribution of wealth shows at a glance that they lack the relation to each other which the true laws of distribution must have. They do not correlate and coordinate. Hence, at least two of these three laws are either wrongly apprehended or wrongly stated. This tallies with what we have already seen, that the current apprehension of the law of wages, and, inferentially, of the law of interest, will not bear examination. Let us, then, seek the true laws of the distribution of the produce of labor into wages, rent, and interest. The proof that we have found them will be in their correlation that they meet, and relate, and mutually bound each other.

With profits this inquiry has manifestly nothing to do. We want to find what it is that determines the division of their joint produce between land, labor, and capital, and profits is not a term that refers exclusively to any one of these three divisions. Of the three parts into which profits are divided by political economists—namely,