THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION, 307 



rural people who here grow wheat and there pasture cattle, find it pos- 

 sible to occupy themselves in their special businesses ? These groups 

 can severally do it only if each gets from the others in exchange for 

 its own surplus product, due shares of their surplus products. No 

 longer directly effected by barter, this obtainment of their respective 

 shares of one another's products is indirectly effected by money ; and 

 if we ask how each division of producers gets its due amount of the 

 required money, the answer is — by fulfillment of contract. If Leeds 

 makes woolens and does not, by fulfillment of contract, receive the 

 means of obtaining from agricultural districts the needful quantity of 

 food, it must starve, and stop producing woolens. If South Wales 

 smelts iron and there comes no equivalent agreed upon, enabling it to 

 get fabrics for clothing, its industry must cease. And so throughout, 

 in general and in detail. That mutual dependence of parts which we 

 see in social organization, as in individual organization, is possible only 

 on condition that while each part does the particular kind of work it 

 has become adjusted to, it receives its proportion of those materials 

 required for repair and growth, which all the other parts have joined 

 to produce : such proportion being settled by bargaining. Moreover, 

 it is by fulfillment of contract that there is effected a balancing of all 

 the various products of the various needs — the large manufacture of 

 knives and the small manufacture of lancets ; the great growth of 

 wheat and the small growth of mustard-seed. The check on undue 

 production of each commodity results from finding that after a certain 

 quantity, no one will agree to take any further quantity on terms that 

 yield an adequate money equivalent. And so there is prevented a 

 useless expenditure of labor in producing that which society does not 

 want. 



Lastly, we have to note the still more significant fact that the con- 

 dition under which only, any specialized group of workers can grow 

 when the community needs more of its particular kind of work, is that 

 contracts shall be free and fulfillment of them enforced. If when, from 

 lack of material, Lancashire failed to supply the usual amount of cot- 

 ton-goods, there had been such interference with contracts as prevented 

 Yorkshire from asking a greater price for its woolens, which it was 

 enabled to do by the greater demand for them, there would have been 

 no temptation to put more capital into the woolen manufacture, no 

 increase in the amount of machinery and number of artisans emplo3'ed, 

 and no increase of woolens : the consequence being that the whole 

 community would have suffered from not having deficient cottons re- 

 placed by extra woolens. What serious injury may result to a nation 

 if its members are hindered from contracting with one another, was 

 well shown in the contrast between England and France in respect of 

 railways. Here, though considerable obstacles were at first raised by 

 the legislating classes, the obstacles were not such as prevented capi- 

 talists from investing, engineers from furnishing directive skill, or con- 



