F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 131 



heritage from what it would have been if the practice of individual 

 inheritance in that heritage had then been absent. All men to-day are 

 the heirs of a body of knowledge accessible to them without distinction ; 

 to a system of law, and to a considerable amount of communal wealth 

 in parks, roads, and public facilities. That social heritage is an important 

 factor in the total quantity of wealth which is produced in response to a 

 specified aggregate of human effort to-day. If that heritage had been less 

 in quantity or different in quality from what it actually is, the economic 

 response to human effort to-day would certainly be quite different. It 

 may also be, though this is less capable of proof, an important factor in 

 the share of that quantity which accrues to a specified individual effort 

 on the part of M and N, members of that community, respectively. Now 

 the social heritage in question when it was ' incubating,' so to speak, in 

 readiness for the present generation, was incubating iinder certain con- 

 ditions of individual inheritance. Would it have been the same social 

 heritage if the incubating conditions had not included individual inherit- 

 ance ? 



It will be seen, therefore, that while we may focus on individual 

 inheritance, it cannot be wholly dissociated from the communal aspects. 

 When M comes into the world, he has, as an economic unit, to associate 

 with two types of assistance, i.e. what he individually inherits from his 

 parents, and what he socially inherits from previous society, and in both 

 of these the principle of individual inheritance has been present. 



But this social heritage, which is either economically richer or poorer 

 in potentiality because it was the product of a set of conditions which 

 included indi\'idual inheritance, is one of the chief working assets of every 

 individual to-day, whether he has the benefit of some particular individual 

 inheritance or not. The effects of inheritance as a custom do not, 

 therefore, exhaust themselves in the direct line, as may be clearer from 

 hypothetical illustrations. Suppose that the power of bequest is an 

 immense stimulus to an able man, who under its influence exerts his 

 ingenuity to the highest degree, creates new capital forms, and new mental 

 embodiment of his genius in organisation. He raises the potentiality of 

 the average worker as a unit in the social system, enriching himself and 

 his social environment simultaneously. Under this system an individual 

 in the next generation observes that he is not so well off as he would have 

 been if the inherited wealth had not gone to the heir, but had been diffused 

 over the community, but he perhaps fails to observe or realise that if the 

 personal wealth had not been destined to go to the heir, the addition to 

 the social heritage might never have come into being. He has not, 

 indeed, inherited his share of the wJwle results of that man's life, but only 

 that unseen, unrealised part which was enjoyed by the community. It 

 was, moreover, impossible to inherit both, because this non-inheritance"of 

 the personal part was a condition under which both the personal part and 

 the social part came into being. Whether this is a likely picture of reality 

 or not depends obviously on the initial assumption, i.e. whether it is true 

 in any sense that the power of bequest is a real differential as an economic 

 incentive. Let us take an assumption applicable to the environment as 

 distinct from the individual, and suppose that the knowledge that the 

 individual can leave his wealth to his son and not to the community acts 



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