356 Canadian Record of Science. 
varied operations of industry. “Labour in the physical 
world is always and solely employed in putting objects in 
motion.” Man has no other means of acting upon matter 
than by moving it. 
Money, which is the appointed medium of exchange of 
valuables, has nowadays also become a commodity, and as 
such has a changeable value. It ought in reality to be only 
the means of mobilizing or circulating wealth ; but is now 
essentially the most highly privileged factor of all, demand- 
ing security and interest, and which can itself earn wealth 
unproductively and without risk. Hvery operation of credit, 
if only for the mobilization of actual wealth, begets an ex- 
cessive demand for the only valid measure of value, viz, 
Gold. Payments which in their origin had nothing whatever 
to do with gold must nevertheless be paid in gold. In short, 
the present monetary system produces an artificial and pre- 
viously undreamt of demand for this single privileged value- 
measurer; while it is perfectly conceivable that a medium 
for the circulation and estimation of valuables could be pro- 
cured which would dispense with all these questionably 
essential privileges. 
The attempt to ameliorate the condition of the working 
classes by making a certain amount of wealth a common 
birthright by an equal division of the land, or rather of the 
matter of the universe, can never become a modus vivendi. 
It is against laws of nature, such as the struggle for exist- 
ence and the survival of the fittest, which are not to be got 
rid of. Hndeavours after a common ownership of the land, 
whether in the gross communistic form or in the biander 
form of Bellamyism, can never have any result in actual 
fact. 
We must consequently confine our attention to some form 
of distribution which is consonant with the law of the 
struggle for existence, and which, as to its possibilities for 
the individual, depends on his fitness to acquire the wealth 
which improved conditions of life will enable him to obtain. 
Every consideration points to the fact that machinery is 
