The complete static conception of society requires that no _entrepreneur_ should be left in the field who cannot continue indefinitely to hold his own against the competition of his rivals, and this requires essential equality of productive power on the part of all of them. It is not necessary, however, that all should operate upon an equal scale of magnitude, for an interesting feature of modern life is the need of many small productive establishments that cater to local demands and to wants which, without being local, call for only a few articles of a kind. Repairs, small orders, and peculiar orders are executed more cheaply in small establishments, and they survive under the very rule of essential equality of productive power which static conditions require. For catering to the general market and producing staple goods the large establishment has a decisive advantage, and this insures the centralization which is the marked feature of recent industrial life. CHAPTER X RENT _The Term "Rent" as Historically Used._--The word _rent_ has a striking history. The science of political economy first took shape in a country in which direct employers of labor were not, as a rule, the owners of much land. Farmers, merchants, and many manufacturers hired land and furnished only the auxiliary capital which was necessary in order to utilize it. In a practical way the earnings of land were thus separated from those of capital in other forms, since they went to a different class of persons; and in the thought of the people the charges made for the use of mere ground came to constitute a unique kind of income. If, during the last century, the land in England had been a highly mercantile commodity, and if it had been the common practice of _entrepreneurs_ not to hire it but to buy and own it, as they bought and owned all other industrial instruments, there is little probability that land would have been considered, either in practical thought or in science, as a thing to be as broadly distinguished as it has been from all other capital goods. A business man would have measured his permanent fund of capital in pounds sterling and would have included in the amount whatever he had invested in land. As in America any representation of the capital of a corporation includes the sums invested in every productive way, and this includes the value of all land that the company holds, so in England, under a similar system of conducting business, any statement of the amount of a particular business capital would have included the whole of the productive wealth embarked in the enterprise; and in any statement of the forms of it there would have appeared, besides a list of all tools, buildings, unfinished goods, and the like, a schedule of the prices of land that the company owned and used. In "putting capital into his business" a man might buy land, in "withdrawing his capital" he might sell it; and the land in the interim would be the