1906-7. ] IGNORED DISTINCTIONS IN ECONOMICS. ars 
of the whole, we find that their products are complementary each to the 
other. For the service of humanity, we must have so many farmers, 
so many mechanics, so many doctors and so on, each necessary for all the 
rest and all the rest necessary for the support of each. When the farmers 
have raised their crops they have done their share of the service to pay 
for the services of all the rest. The same is true of the mechanics and of 
all the other occupations. In this relationship there is not necessarily 
any debt. Service pays for service. 
But in the relationship between the industrial classes and the collectors 
of land value, there necessarily arises debt, which continues to grow larger 
and larger age after age. Where the first settlers in the city had to pay 
a dollar an acre yearly for the occupation of the land, their successors had 
to pay hundreds or thousands yearly, and the successors of these will find 
that they will have to multiply that payment still more. The farmer 
charges for the crop of the year, and his charge ceases; but the man who 
charged a dollar yearly a century ago for the use of an acre, was empow- 
ered by law to leave to his successors the power to charge for that acre 
year after year continuously. By allowing individuals to charge their 
fellows for the occupation of the land, we establish a relationship which 
places one part of society under an obligation that grows year after year, 
thus making a debt which increases continually, which is everlasting 
and which under present conditions is irredeemable. 
How then shall we define wealth? To identify it with value is a 
fatal mistake, for while the increase of one kind of value is concurrent 
with an increase of wealth, the increase of the other kind of value indicates 
an increase of poverty. It is also a mistake to confine the term ‘‘wealth”’ 
to the products of industry. For the proper investigation of the distri- 
bution of wealth, we must carefully distinguish the gifts of nature, the 
“Natural Wealth,” from the products of industry, ‘ Labor produced 
Wealth” (MacVane p. 39). For the same purpose we must also carefully 
distinguish the values which are due to industry from the values which 
are caused by the presence of the population, and which attach themselves 
to the land, the forest, the water-powers, the mines, and the franchises. 
Then, again, we must not confound wealth with individual riches. The 
disappearance of the forests has made many a lumberman and mine owner 
rich, because the world has grown poorer. The wealth won by the land- 
speculator or the stock gambler can be gained only by the impoverishment 
of the producer. Wealth and the distribution of wealth are two different 
things, and more than one treatise is a jumble of confusion, because the 
author has confounded wealth with individual riches. It is a terrible 
mistake to define wealth as the power to appropriate, as some writers 
have done, and to teach that slaves are wealth, as others have done, is to 
confound wealth with spoliation. 
