umed to cost nothing. Hence no portion of capital has any share in the division of the profit which does not also have an influence upon its amount, and hence also the proportion between the rent gained and the capital employed must be more favourable in agriculture than in manufacture. As however, in agriculture also, the profit on capital is calculated at the reduced rate determined by manufacture, there must always remain a surplus of rent, which falls to the landowner as land-rent. This, according to Rodbertus, is the origin of land-rent, and its distinction from profit on capital.*35
I may shortly supplement this by remarking that, notwithstanding the very severe theoretical judgment that he pronounces on profit in describing it as plunder, Rodbertus will not hear of abolishing either private property in capital or profit on capital. Nay, he ascribes to property in land and capital "an educating power" which we cannot spare; a "kind of patriarchal power that could only be replaced after a completely altered system of national instruction, for which at present we have not got even the conditions."*36 Property in land and capital appear to him in the meanwhile to have "a kind of official position involving the national functions of managing the economic labour and the economic resources of the nation in correspondence with national need."
Thus from this, its most favourable point of view, rent may be regarded as a form of salary which certain "officers" receive for the execution of their functions.*37 I have already observed above how this remark, casually expressed in a mere note, formed the basis on which later writers, particularly Schäffle, have built up a peculiar form of the Labour theory.
To come now to criticism of Rodbertus's system. Without circumlocution I may say at once that I consider the theory which it contains to be an entire failure. I am convinced that it suffers from a series of grave theoretical defects which I shall endeavour to set forth in the following pages as clearly and as impartially as may be.
At the outset I am obliged to take exception to the very first stone that Rodbertus lays in the structure of his system—the proposition that all goods, economically considered, are products of labour and of labour alone.
First of all, what do the words "economically considered" mean? Rodbertus explains them by a contrast. He puts the economical standpoint in opposition to the physical standpoint. That goods, physically speaking, are the products not only of labour but of natural powers, he explicitly allows. If then it is said that, from the economic standpoint, goods are the product of labour only, the statement can surely have but one meaning, viz. that the co-operation of natural powers in production is a matter of utter indifference so far as human economy is concerned. On one occasion Rodbertus gives forcible expression to this conception when he says: "All other goods except those that have cost labour, however useful or necessary they may be to mankind, are natural goods, and have no place in economic consideration." "Man may be thankful for what nature has done beforehand in the case of economic goods, as it has spared him so much extra labour, but economy takes notice of them only in so far as labour has completed the work of nature."*38
Now this is simply false. Even purely natural goods have a place in economic consideration, provided only they are scarce as compared with the need for them. If a lump of solid gold in the shape of a meteoric stone falls on a man's field, is it not to be economically considered? Or if a silver mine is discovered by chance on his estate, is the silver not to be economically considered? Will the owner of the field really pay no attention to the gold and silver given him by nature, or give them away, or waste them, simply because they were bestowed on him by nature without exertion on his part? Will he not preserve them just as carefully as he would gold and silver that he had earned by the labour of his hands; place them in security from the greed of others; 