fortune is of his own personal making? It is this. Let it be granted that his skill and judgment, in equipping his works with the best up-to-date plant and in organising production, markets, and finance in the best possible manner, enable him to enlarge his output of the goods he makes. Something else is necessary in order that he may make a large income out of the profitable sale of these goods. In the first place, if other industrialists in his line of business are as able as he is, they may be increasing the output of their plant as rapidly as he, in which case the enlargement of his total supply of these goods upon the market may lead to a large fall in prices and in profits. Thus the income he receives depends to a considerable extent not upon what he does, but upon what others are doing in his line of business. So much for the 'supply' side of the determination of his price and profit. But far more important is the fact that his real income, the command over the general body of goods and services which his money income represents, depends upon the productive operation of all the other industries throughout the world whose products come into comparison with his by means of money and market prices. For this real income, or profit, which he thinks to be of his exclusive 'making,' expands or contracts to an indefinite extent with the expansion or contraction of other goods which compose the 'demand' for the particular goods towards the supply of which he contributes.
Turning from income to property, the capitalised form of ownership, the absurdity of the contention
