impoverishing of the weaker, but from the aggrandizing of the stronger. It is not that the rewards of the inferior are less, but that the rewards of the superior are greater. Every step of the Industrial Revolution above described was made in obedience to the law of adaptation or proximate advantage. With each step came a new surplus to be shared, and hence the means to swell some incomes without cutting down others. Our discovery, then, is not that the many have lost, but that the advantaged few, possessing superior natural opportunities, unusual legal rights or exceptional personal abilities, have been able under the individualistic regime legitimately to attract to themselves. most of the benefits of progress, and, if unmolested, can continue to do so in the future. Our study of actual values is now finished. The objective movement has been traced, and our conclusion, stated broadly and without the due qualifications,-for laws as well as men must be born naked-is that, under the present régime, men's efficiencies, and consequently their rewards, are more unequal than their exertions. Translated into the terms of value theory, this means that the disproportion between economic rewards and subjective industrial costs is steadily increasing. It needs but little reflection to see that this proposition is identical with that reached in the long evolution of value doctrines-viz: that values do not correspond to costs. Our argument is therefore complete. The testimony of objective fact is the same as that drawn from subjective interpretation. The course of economic theory is parallel to the course of actual values, and the common direction of both doubly justifies my conclusion that the tendency of natural value is toward slighter and ever slighter conformity to the subjective cost of the good or services valued. This closes our economic inquiry. But it is well to note what follows, if the law I have formulated is true. It has been for a century supposed that the cause of the great inequalities in men's possessions is political or civil inequality, privilege, oppressive laws, unjust taxation, etc. And so for a century men have labored to abolish privilege and realize justice. Modern laws grant equal rights: universal suffrage confers equal power: free schools favor equal opportunity. But now that the last vestiges of these ancient wrongs are being swept away, and the grand outlines of the Free and Just State are beginning to appear, Democracy recoils in dismay before the apparition of a great and growing economic inequality, that mocks the labors and reforms of a hundred years. It is true men still hug their illusions. The optimistic faith in "natural law," "natural justice," "natural equality" hides from the masses the real source of the appalling inequalities of wealth. Men continue to rage blindly against government, and charge their ills to bad laws and unfair taxation. But the time is coming,-nay is now come,-when Democracy will clash with Individualism. It is impossible to avert the catastrophe. When two trains are approaching each other on the same track one must reverse. Whether by violent collision or by slowing up, stand still and recoil-in any case the movement of one or of the other must cease. Either the Democratic Spirit, impatient at the impotence of the shrunken Laissez-faire State to realize even proximate equality, will arrest the automatic movement of values and interfere with the natural distribution of wealth, or the Plutocratic Spirit, spurning the hollow democratic dogma of the natural equality of men, will arrest the levelling process and destroy the equal distribution of political power. The System of Inequality is repugnant to the prevailing ethical sense as well as to the democratic spirit. Deep in the popular consciousness lies the conviction that in the stupendous coöperations of modern industry the associates should be rewarded in proportion to intelligent exertions. The joint product should be apportioned according to pains and positive sacrifices, rather than according to replaceableA system that more and more ignores exertions, and exaggerates superiorities and rareties, can not be reconciled with the common standard of justice. It is true that standard admits unequal rewards, answering to unequal faculties. But the obvious individualistic corollary, that each should at all times receive the full benefits and evils of his own nature and conduct, fails to rally the popular conscience in approval of the rewards apportioned under a system of associated effort and unlimited competition that enormously lengthens the leverage of certain kinds of superiority in faculty or opportunity. To avoid violent collision, then, between the economic system and the ethical standard it is necessary either that men's notions of justice be squared with the individualistic conception, or else that values be made to conform more closely to costs. It is vain to seek an ethical support for the System of Inequality in the biological conclusions of Darwin. The dispersive tendency I have described is not, I take it, the agency that segregates and destroys the unfit. Its effect is rather to segregate and enrich the advantaged few. And for these, although it multiplies their luxuries, it does not appreciably multiply the chances of surviving or propagating. Regarded as a means of improving the race by selection of the fittest, it is practically valueless. The defenders of the System of Inequality would do well, therefore, to rest their case on abstract right and justice, rather than on its serviceableness to the progress of the species. Finally, it is to be observed that the great Social question, viz: whether or not values shall conform to costs-admits of many answers. The margin that prevents the subsidence. of values into uniform proportion to cost is technically known as Differential Gains or Monopoly Profits. As these are of various species, it is possible to eliminate them progressively, or to abolish some, while leaving others. Such agencies as employment bureaus, building and loan associations, savings banks, municipal industries, state railroad commissions, free schools, etc., convert specific classes of Differential Gains or certain kinds of Monopoly Profits into a diffused general surplus. It may be, therefore, that ameliorative measures will slowly and almost imperceptibly retard, and eventually overcome, the ominous movement of natural values I have sought to trace in this paper. Leland Stanford, Junior, University. EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross. THE BERING SEA CONTROVERSY FROM AN ECONOMIC STANDPOINT. T would seem to be beyond question that, whatever the scope of the Arbitration, held at Paris, its prime object was the preservation of the fur-seal; and further, it is an axiom, that the seal skin industry, as a commercial enterprise of importance, cannot long exist, unless the skins are secured by methods in which selection, as to the seals to be killed, can be and is exercised. The seal skin industry of the present day draws for its supply of pelts both upon the fur-seal of the north and of the south. For the practical purposes of trade, and, indeed, in their habits the two are nearly identical, but certain cranial and other physical differences are found sufficiently marked to warrant naturalists in treating them as separate speciesthat of the north being known as Callorhinus and that of the south as Arctocephalus. Each group furnishes skins which, though not of equal quality or value, stand high in the fur markets of the world; and, although formerly their contributions reached millions, to-day dealers and consumers are compelled to rely chiefly upon the northern seal; this, too, in the face of the fact that its rookeries occur at only four' localities, while those of its southern relative have been found at not less than thirty. An examination of the cause of this decadence of the latter, though leading us somewhat afield, 1 Seals of the species Callorhinus still resort to : 1. The Pribilof Islands. 2. The Commander Islands, Bering Sea. 3. Robben Reef, on the west side of Okhotsk Sea. 4. The Kurile Islands, extending from the northern end of the Japan Islands to the southern extremity of Kamchatka. Seals of the species Arctocephalus still resort to, and are protected by the Government of Uruguay, on Lobos Islands, at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata and its two little neighbors Castillos and Coronilla. These localities furnish annually to the trade, under the name Lobos skius, between fifteen and twenty thousand pelts. Although a few skins still find their way from some of the will prove an instructive digression, as it will reveal useful economic facts and offer valuable suggestions concerning the future of the industry. Civilized man's acquaintance with the fur-seal certainly began with, if not before, the first circumnavigation of the globe, and from then until now this animal has not only other South Sea resorts to the London market, and together with the Lobos quota swell the annual total contributions from this source to between twenty and twenty-five thousand pelts, the Southern seals have been practically exterminated at the following localities :— 1. San Benito Island. 2. Cerros (or Cedros) Islands. 3. Guadalupe Island. 4. Santa Barbara Islands. Off the coast of Lower California. 5. Farallone Islands, 32 miles west of San Francisco. 6. Juan Fernandez, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. 7. Massa Fuera, 110 miles west of Juan Fernandez. 8. Coast of Chile and adjacent islands. 9. St. Felix Island, in the Pacific, west of Chile. 10. Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific, west of Ecuador. II. Falkland Islands. 12. Terra del Fuego. 13. South Shetland Islands, 600 miles south of Cape Horn. 14. South Georgia, in the South Atlantic, 300 miles east of Cape Horn, 55° south latitude. 15. Bouvet Island, east of Cape Horn and nearly south of the Cape of Good Hope. 16. Sandwichland Island, in South Atlantic, southeast of South Georgia Island. 17. Shores and adjacent islands of west coast of South Africa northward to about 28° south latitude. 18. Tristan d'Acunha, south Atlantic, midway between the Cape of Good Hope and Montevideo. 19. Gough's Island, South Atlantic, southeast of Tristan d'Acunha. 20. Kerguelen Land or Desolation Island, southern part of the Indian Ocean midway between Africa and Australia. 21. St. Paul Island. 22. Amsterdam Island. } Indian Ocean, northwest of Kerguelen Land. 23. Crozet Islands, west of Kerguelen Land and southeast of Cape of Good Hope. 24. Prince Edward Island, west of Crozet Islands. 25. Southern coast of Victoria, Australia, from Western Port to Wilson's Promontory, and on the Islands in Bass's Strait. 26. Tasmania. 27. St. Ambrose Island, 26° south 80° west. 28. East coast of Patagonia from 42° south, and west coast south of Gulf of Ponas. |