Moreover, the habit of looking at the wage contract as a matter of commutative justice in the mere sense of contractual justice, is radically defective. The transaction between employé and employer involves other questions of justice than that which arises immediately out of the relation between the things exchanged. When a borrower repays a loan of ten dollars, he fulfils the obligation of justice because he returns the full equivalent of the article that he received. Nothing else is pertinent to the question of justice in this transaction. Neither the wealth nor the poverty, the goodness nor the badness, nor any other quality of either lender or borrower, has a bearing on the justice of the act of repayment. In the wage contract, and in every other contract that involves the distribution of the common bounty of nature, or of the social product, the juridical situation is vitally different from the transaction that we have just considered. The employer has obligations of justice, not merely as the receiver of a valuable thing through an onerous contract, but as the _distributor_ of the common heritage of nature. His duty is not merely contractual, but social. He fulfils not only an individual contract, but a social function. Unless he performs this social and distributive function in accordance with justice, he does not adequately discharge the obligation of the wage contract. For the product out of which he pays wages is not his in the same sense as the personal income out of which he repays a loan. His claim upon the product is subject to the obligation of just distribution; the obligation of so distributing the product that the labourers who have contributed to the product shall not be denied their right to a decent livelihood on reasonable terms from the bounty of the earth. On the other hand, the activity of the labourer is not a mere commodity, as money or pork; it is the output of a _person_, and a person who has no other means of realising his inherent right to a livelihood. Consequently, both terms of the contract, the labour and the compensation, involve other elements of justice than that which arises out of their assumed mutual equivalence. In a word, justice requires the employer not merely to give an equivalent for labour (an equivalent which is determined by some arbitrary, conventional, fantastic, or impossible attempt to compare work and pay) but to fulfil his obligation of justly distributing that part of the common bounty of the earth which comes into his hands by virtue of his social function in the industrial process. How futile, then, to endeavour by word juggling to describe the employer's obligation in terms of mere equivalence and contractual justice!