distribution of the fruits of industry. For the specific defects named above are seen to be closely associated with restraints of competition, and may plausibly be regarded as exceptions which by no means justify a general condemnation of the justice or utility of a system of distribution based upon freedom of competition.
§2. In order to test the character of distribution fairly, we must study it under normal not under exceptional circumstances, and in its constituent acts. Distribution is composed of, or achieved by, transactions which, for lack of any better term, we call bargains. Much investigation has taken place of certain classes of bargains, particularly in reference to sales of the use of the factors of production, and special laws of rent, wages, interest, have been founded upon these studies. The general effect of these studies among earlier economists was to break up the unity of industry: first, by suggesting that bargains for the use of land, of capital, and of labour-power were subject to radically different laws; secondly, by failure to relate these laws of the value or the price of the factors of production to the laws which were found to determine the price of the commodities which they contributed to produce. More recent economic writers have made considerable advances toward the integration or unification of a theory of Distribution, by relating the theories of determining the price of
