When that problem is at last faced, the question of the proportion in
which the national income shall be distributed can have only one answer.
All our shares must be equal. It has always been so; it always will
be so. It is true that the incomes of robbers vary considerably from
individual to individual; and the variation is reflected in the incomes
of their parasites. The commercialization of certain exceptional talents
has also produced exceptional incomes, direct and derivative. Persons
who live on rent of land and capital are economically, though not
legally, in the category of robbers, and have grotesquely different
incomes. But in the huge mass of mankind variation Of income from
individual to individual is unknown, because it is ridiculously
impracticable. As a device for persuading a carpenter that a judge is a
creature of superior nature to himself, to be deferred and submitted to
even to the death, we may give a carpenter a hundred pounds a year and a
judge five thousand; but the wage for one carpenter is the wage for
all the carpenters: the salary for one judge is the salary for all the
judges.