LABOUR 269 



To Herr von Thiinen, a German political economist, still well 

 remembered and attentively studied in the United States though 

 forgotten among ourselves — except by declared profit-sharers ; for 

 he may be considered the originator of profit-sharing — belongs, as 

 observed, the credit of having discerned, so far as records go, sooner 

 than any other man, the necessity of altering, in view of altered 

 circumstances, also the principle upon which relations between 

 employers and employed must be based, and at the same time, also, 

 the direction in which such relations are tending and the way in 

 which they must ultimately be settled, a good nine decades ago. 

 In his book, " Der gerechte Arbeitslohn und dessen Verhalknisst 

 zum Zinsfuss und zur Landrente" ("Just Wages and their relation 

 to the Rate of Interest and the Rent Paid for Land "), he argues the 

 question very closely, and insists that the wage system then— and in 

 principle still — prevalent could not permanently give satisfaction nor 

 produce a fair settlement qualified to last. He did not yet think of 

 co-partnership. One reason for this probably was that, like myself, 

 he considered it scarcely applicable to agriculture, as involving 

 co-ownership in a freehold or a lease. Co-partnership means making 

 labourers co-proprietors of the fixed capital employed — a matter 

 perfectly practicable in industrial undertakings but scarcely so in 

 the possession of land, which its owner naturally would desire to 

 keep as his own property — and still less practicable in the case of a 

 tenant's lease. We could not under this head take the co-operative 

 land settlement ventures, such as the Assingtons and the Italian, 

 Serbian and Roumanian affittanze collettive, into account. They are 

 cases of self-employment, not of employment by others. However, 

 he saw at once the practicability of profit-sharing, which in agricul- 

 ture is pretty pronounced — profit-sharing which makes labourers 

 co-partners, though not in the capital employed, yet essentially so 

 in the annual profits taken from a concern — co-partners in proportion 

 to their contributions to the output. 



His example has been followed by not a few other landowners 

 and farmers, all of whom, with very few exceptions, have — as, 

 among other things, appears from the evidence given before the late 

 Royal Commission on Agriculture — found it to work satisfactorily. 

 The late Lord Wallscourt, who put profit-sharing into practice on 

 his property in Galway about the same time that Herr von Thiinen 

 did on his estate in Mecklenburg, was likewise completely satisfied 

 with the results obtained. Unfortunately, as his son the late peer, 

 now likewise deceased, advised me, his father's papers were somehow 

 lost, so that we are unable at the present time to discover precisely 



