564 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
self needs for the accomplishment of his own purposes. A perfect coincidence 
of this nature is the dream of modern Utopias; but my present subject is only 
the economic side of the shield. 
The economic organism, then, of an industrial society represents the in- 
strumentality by which every man by doing what he can for some of his 
fellows gets what he wants from others. It is true. of course, that those for 
whom he makes or does something may be the same as those from whom he gets 
the particular things he wants. But this is not usual. In such a society as ours 
the persons whom a man serves are usually incapable of serving him in the 
way he desires, but they can put him in command of the services he requires, 
though they cannot render them. This is accomplished by the instrumentality 
of money, which is a generalised command of the services and commodities in 
the circle of exchange; ‘money’ being at once a standard in which all market 
prices (or objective places of differential significances amongst themselves) are 
expressed, and a universal commodity which everyone who wishes to exchange 
what he has for what he wants will accept as a medium, or middle term, by 
which to effect the transformation. Thus in most commercial transactions one 
party furthers a specific purpose of the other, and receives in exchange a 
command, defined in amount but not in kind, of services and commodities in 
general; the scale of equivalence being a publicly recognised thing announced in 
current market prices. Every member of the community who stands in 
economic relations with others alternately generalises his special resources and 
then specialises his general resources, first directly furthering someone else’s 
purposes and then picking out the persons who can directly further his. Thus 
each of us puts in what he has at one point of the circle of exchange and takes 
out what he wants at another. Being out of work is being unable to find 
anyone who values our special service enough to relinquish in our favour a 
command of services in general which we will consent to accept in return. 
It is the failure to find anyone who will specialise his general command, into 
our particular service, on terms that suit us. 
We return now to the problem of economic distribution. Land, manifold 
apparatus, various specialised faculties of hand, eye, and brain, are essential, 
let us say. to the production of some commodity valued by someone, it does not 
matter who, for some purpose, it does not matter what. None of these 
heterogeneous factors can be dispensed with, and therefore the product in its 
totality is dependent upon the co-operation of each one severally. But there 
is room for wide variety in the proportions in which they are combined, and 
whatever the existine proportion may be each factor has a differential signifi- 
cance, and all these differential significances can be expressed in a common unit ; 
that is to say, all can be expressed in terms of each other, by noting the 
increment or decrement of any one that would be the equivalent of a given 
decrement or increment of any other; equivalence being measured by the 
neutralising of the effect upon the product, or rather, not upon the material 
product itself, but the command of generalised resources in the circle of exchanze 
for the sake of which it is produced. The manager of a business is constantly 
engaged in considering, for instance, how much labour such-and-such a machine 
would save; how much raw material a man of such-and-such character would 
save; what equivalent an expansion of his premises would yield in ease and 
smoothness in the conduct of business; how much economy in the shop would 
be effected by a given addition to the staff in the office, and so on. This is 
censidering differential significances and their equivalences as they affect his 
business. And all the time he is also considering the prices at which he can 
obtain these several factors, dependent upon their differential significances to 
other people in other businesses. His skill consists, like that of the housewife 
in the market, in expanding and contracting his expenditure on the several 
factors of production so as to bring their differential significances to himself into 
coincidence with their market prices. And note that the same principle can be 
applied without any difficulty to such immaterial factors of efficiency as ‘ good 
will,’ or notoriety; but it would delay us too long to work this out or to antici- 
pate possible objections. A hint must suffice. 
Here, then, we have a firm theoretical basis for the study of distribution, 
independent of the particular form of organisation of a business. Whether 
those in command of the several factors of production meet and discuss the 
