Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/120

100 mortality, but a similar principle may be applied to the occupations of the people. The individual lawyer or carpenter perishes, but the profession or the trade survives, like a Platonic idea. In a stationary economic condition of a people, we might suppose that every trade and profession is an immortal, unchanging corporation. In this way we can see that Petty was justified in valuing the people as he valued the land—both are permanent sources of income. If the society under consideration is progressive, we are still more justified in this method of procedure in arriving at a minimum valuation. If wages are rising and the number of workers is increasing, we may he certain that after an interval of, say, ten years, the value of the 'living capital,' however estimated, will be greater than at present, and this living capital may be regarded as of the most permanent kind.

When this principle is once admitted, the only difficulty is to separate that part of the total income of the community, due to living labour in every shape and form, from that part due to capital in the narrow sense of the term. As the main practical object of this paper is to supplement Mr. Giffen's familiar estimates, it will be convenient, as already indicated, to take his figures to start with.

In an essay on the progress of the working classes, Mr. Giffen states:—'The capitalist as such gets a low interest for his money, and the aggregate return to capital is not a third part of the aggregate income of the country (which may be put at not less than £1,200 millions) and is, as I should estimate,not much more than a fourth part.' It follows at once from this that the value of the 'living capital' is, at any rate, nearly three times the value of the dead. If it be objected that this simple method of valuation is illusory, I reply that it is actually less illusory than Mr. Giffen's own calculations, for the living capital of the race is less perishable than much of the so-called material capital.

But the full strength of the case can only be seen when the details of Mr. Giffen's method are examined. Take, for example, the table quoted in his recent work on the Growth of Capital (page 11). The object of this table is to give the amounts of the principal classes of income, and to capitalise those parts of these incomes which are supposed to he derived from capital proper. Now it will be found that of the total income of the trades and professions for 1885, namely, £180,000,000, only one-fifth part is supposed to be derived from capital, and this is capitalised at only fifteen years' purchase. But the curious thing is that in the other