some eighty-fold in half a century; but we hear little of proposals to buy up at their present market
value the site of some future Chicago, unless, indeed, as part of a scheme for Land Nationalisation,
which does not include compensation to vested interests. Unlike the husbandman, who plants trees
the fruit of which he will not himself see, the advocates of a single tax and other socialist agitators
grasp at the standing crop which has been sown by others, heedless whether cultivation in the future
is thereby discouraged.
But, even if their outlook were as distant as it is bounded, there would remain the possibility
that, though looking far ahead, they might not discern distant objects clearly. Mill cannot be accused
of the shortsightedness which sacrifices the future to the present. He looked very far ahead. But he
did not see what was coming, the fall of English rents. Actuated by the highest motives, he proposed
an arrangement which was perfectly just to the landlords, and would have proved perfectly disastrous
to the State.
Passing in the traditional order from Land to Labour, we may begin by considering a very
abstract labour market, in which the difficulty caused by the “advance” of wages is kept out of
sight.58 The following example of such a labour market may be worth reproducing, although it is not
a genuine case of Distribution:—
Let us suppose several rich men about to ascend some an easy mountain, some a difficult
one, each ascent occupying a day. And let these rich travellers enter into negotiations with a set of
porters who may be supposed many times more numerous than the employers. An arrangement
according to which the remuneration for ascending the easy and the difficult mountains was the same
could not stand: it would not be renewed from time to time. For some of the porters employed on
the difficult mountains, seeking to minimise the disutility of their task, would offer their services to
travellers on the easy mountains at a rate somewhat less than the temporarily prevailing one. Nor
would equilibrium be reached until each porter employed on a difficult mountain received an excess
above the fee for the ascent of an easy one sufficient to compensate him for the extra toil. At the
same time—simultaneously, in a mathematical sense—the increment of satisfaction due to the last
porter taken on by each traveller would just compensate the purchaser of that labour for his outlay
on it.59
In this example the great number of the employees as compared with the employers is not
an accidental circumstance. Suppose that the arrangement which is common in the Tyrol—that each
amateur ascensionist should be accompanied by only one guide—were for technical reasons
universal. Then the bargain between travellers, on the one hand, and guides, on the other, would not
in general be perfectly determinate. It would still indeed be true that “an arrangement according to
which the remuneration for ascending the easy and the difficult mountains was the same could not
stand.” But it would no longer be true that the remuneration for the easy mountain—or, rather, for
the average mountain, from which the fares both of the easier and the more difficult ascents might
be measured—would be in general determinate.60 There would in general exist no force of
58. There is an abstract point of view from which, as Professor Barone well observes ( Giornale degli
Economisti, loc. cit.), the circumstance that wages are paid in advance is of secondary importance.
59. Economic Journal, Vol. IV, p. 225.
60. As argued in Mathematical Psychics, p. 42.