they are to be utilised in the creation of further wealth. And the greater the quantities of goods produced the greater may be expected to be the shares that fall to those who supply either ideas, or savings, or manual labour.

Getting on well" means fitting oneself in well into a world where things are managed after this fashion. Those who can supply anything that is relatively scarce, and much in demand, are likely to "get on" better than those who supply what is already plentifully supplied to meet current demands. They fit in more usefully. Skilled workmen are scarcer than unskilled, and plumbers and engineers therefore draw more from the pool than navvies and street-cleaners. Useful new ideas in business are scarcer than most kinds of trained skill, and those who supply these generally flourish accordingly. Savings also are always scarcer than they might be -especially just now when war and war-preparations have been swallowing up what might have gone to swell the apparatus of production, and new worlds and new industries (such as oil-fields and rubber plantations) are crying out for the use of all the capital we can supply. And those, accordingly, who have savings to place at the world's disposal can always get a price for the use of their savings.

Labour-savings-ideas-these three, working together on the materials that Nature provides, (the soil, the vegetation, the animals, the minerals' below the surface) produce our wealth in closely knit collaboration-like three steeds of very different breeds dragging behind them the lumbering car of economic progress. Nations that harness all three steeds wisely and well together progress steadily, like the Dutch and the Belgians (of pre-war days),

whose land, when first we read of it, was little more than a barren waste of marshes and sand with but little mineral wealth below its surface; those nations where one or other of them is ill-attached or missing (industry, or good management, or the habit of saving) fall behind in the race (like the peoples of India and China and of fertile tropical areas whose natural resources remain undeveloped); while those nations that waste and destroy wealth in frenzied wars that take both men and savings from the healthier task of creating the things we all desire, in order to use them instead in burning and breaking, may be expected not merely to fall back into misery themselves but to drag back their neighbours with them.

And this perhaps might have seemed sufficient for a bird's-eye view of our subject. One cardinal fact, however, has been taken for granted. For all forms of activity, the use of land in small quantities or in large, is an indispensable necessity and land nowadays is mostly in private hands,-a fact, that would no doubt appear inexplicable to a Patagonian savage or to a highly intellectual being dropped upon the Earth from the planet Marsbut a fact that is a natural outgrowth of quite comprehensible historical causes. And thus it comes about that the landlord, who controls the land that all members of the community need, can sell the right to use it for any purposes for which it is needed, in the same way as the capitalist who supplies capital (the product of saving) can sell the use of it to those who are willing to pay the price. And so the landlord who supplies nothing (nothing in his capacity as landlord-however well he may serve the community in other capacities-for the

same individual may be capitalist, inventor, business organiser, and landlord in one) takes in the same way as the others from the fund of goods produced by all. If only he could supply land, as the investors supply capital-creating more whenever more is urgently required-his claim to a share in the national wealth would rest on the same footing as the claim of the capitalist. But unfortunately the supply of land is a fixed stock; and thus (as one consequence) the land owner is not usually handicapped, to the same extent as others are handicapped, by the growth of competing agencies dragging down the value of his individual share in the common output of wealth. Rather his share tends normally1 to augment, through the continuous growth in the numbers of men and machines struggling in perpetual competition for the use of this limited stock of wealth-producing power, over which he exercises, by law and custom, a little brief authority.

1 The English agricultural landlord has seen his share of the National Dividend dwindle since the third quarter of the nineteenth century, through the growth of railways opening up competing virgin lands in the New World, and by the growth of agricultural science (enabling a given quantity of produce to be got from smaller areas than before). The English urban landlord may, perhaps, in the future see his share, too, dwindle in similar fashion, through the growth of motor services and conceivably also of aviation-the latter affecting among other things the rents of residential buildings. (Temporarily, of course, his income is now strictly limited by the post-war legislation with regard to house rents, allowing him to get only about the same money income from his house property as he received before the war, out of which money income he can buy much less than his pre-war share of the goods produced by the rest of us.)

These then are what Economists call the four "Factors of Production":-Land controlled by Landlords; Labour, Organisation, and Capital, supplied by Labourers, Business Managers, and Capitalists. The total annual production of wealth (after allowance is made for the replacement and upkeep of existing apparatus and stocks of material) is the National Dividend; and the parts of the total product falling to the four several "factors" are known as Rent, Wages, Profits of Business Management, and Interest. The last of these factors, and of these forms of remuneration, we treat in the next chapter. The second and third (the incomes of workers of all sorts) form the subject matter of Chapter IV.; while Chapter V. deals with questions concerning land and rent.

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CHAPTER III

THE APPARATUS WITH WHICH THE GAME IS PLAYED

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'They also serve who only stand and wait.”—MILTON.

WHAT is saving? And for what purposes do people in general save ?

It is possible no doubt to argue that the saving tendency is an inherent instinct of human nature, like the instinct of the busy bee to gather honey in the summer with (presumably) no prophetic prevision of the needs of the coming winter. Children make collections of the most heterogeneous kinds with no apparent motive other than the pleasure of collecting; and even adults are occasionally found emulating the White Knight of Alice Through the Looking Glass, accumulating miscellaneous oddments and justifying their actions, by an after-thought, on the same grounds as the Knight of Looking-Glass Land-that one never knows when a rat-trap, or a beehive, or an extra million dollars, will come in handy. Certainly the saving habit often grows into something as imperative as an instinct; so imperative that legislators have little fear of discouraging accumulation by such actions as the imposition of "progressive" death-duties (under which the State takes a larger percentage from the heirs the larger the property left momentarily ownerless by a wealthy man's death). After a certain stage, money-spinners go on spinning money with as