upon the mountains, and perpetually forcing its way to the sea—a never-ending cycle where effort and freedom are in direct relation, and have only to be consolidated by order to provide us with a measurable flow of value.[1]
Figure 1
But even Bastiat’s image of the satisfied animal is better than the implied picture, upon which many generations of students have been brought up, representing the whole economic tableau as a kind of egg-laying performance, where there may be a rough approximation of the number of eggs, but the size of the egg is governed by the mood of a spotless white hen. Labor, in this tableau, is the lean choreman who tends the hen, and for his share receives a disappointing portion of these variable-sized eggs, which are set apart in a “wage-fund.” Capital is the hen herself—a magnificent white super-hen, waxing ever fatter on a diet of the crumbled yellow yolks of her own hard-boiled eggs, together with the product of the land on which she rests; and this land, to make up for its failing virtue, is constantly fertilized by the egg shells, the feathers and the nitrogenous by-products of the hen.
The pictures of the pressure-chamber and the stream, though they avoid much complicated detail, are probably closer and
- ↑ See Frontispiece.
