Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/130

 110 to the propositions a slightly different meaning and a slightly different basis; to this point I shall revert later. For the present I will examine by the light of this principle of value a few of its intricacies.

The agents of production, land, capital, and labour, derive their value from the value of their products, ultimately, therefore, from the utility of those products. As stock is valued by the expected dividend, so is the field by the expected crop. A simple idea; yet thereby hangs one of the weightiest problems. Land, capital, and labour yield a return only by their combined agency. Now what is the clue to the distribution amongst the separate effective factors of this joint return? The comparison with stocks and dividends is of no further use to us here, for one share in an investment is like another, while land, capital and labour are diverse. Even if labour alone be considered, the difficulty still confronts us. How are we to divide a machine, constructed by a number of labourers according to the instructions and under the direction of the inventor, so as to refer every part to its true originator?

Theorists have hitherto set down this problem as insoluble, and insoluble it is as commonly stated. It is impossible, to put it briefly, to give a reply to the question as to which part of the child is derived from the father and which from the mother. The question in itself is an absurdity. But it is just in this sense that the problem does not admit of statement, if it is to be correctly stated in the light of practical economy. What is required in economy is, not physical division of the product amongst all its creative factors, but the practical imputation of it, imputation in the sense used by a magistrate in speaking of a legal 'charge.' A sophist might maintain the impossibility of determining, amongst the thousand conditions, without the conjunction of which a murder could not have been effected, what share in the deed fell on the murderer; the judge, unperplexed by such scruples, sifts those thousand causes solely to get at the responsible author, and charges him with the whole of the deed. Who would accuse him of offending nature and logic thereby? And as he is concerned with the responsible author, so in economy, it is always amongst the thousand implicated causes with the practically determining factor that we have to do.

A field cultivated with the same expenditure of capital and labour as another field of greater fertility yields a larger return. This surplus crop is by no means produced by the field alone, capital and labour as well are wrought into it;