In a perfectly static condition there would be, as we have seen, a standard shape for all society, which means a normal apportionment of labor and capital among the producing groups and subgroups and also among the local divisions of the general area. The elements would subside to a state of equilibrium and become motionless, as water finds its level and becomes still in a sheltered pool. The body of fluid takes its standard shape and retains it, so long as no disturbing force appears. Now, society would have such a standard shape and would require, in the absence of dynamic changes, a relatively short time in order to conform more or less closely to it, if it were not for the unnatural apportionment of population in different parts of the area that the society inhabits and the obstacles which wholesale migrations encounter. For the solution of problems of the present and the near future we must accept as a standard the quasi-static adjustment of the population and the consequent quasi-static selection of industries in the different local divisions of the broad area--the arrangement that we have described as locating an excess of manufacturing in the more densely peopled areas and an excess of agriculture in the more sparsely settled ones. With this qualification it may be said that there is a standard apportionment of labor and capital among the producing groups, and that these agents gravitate powerfully and even rapidly toward it. If there were a certain amount of labor and capital at _A_, a certain amount at _B_, and so throughout the system, this standard shape would be attained, and the elements would not move, except as a very slow movement would be caused by changes in the comparative density of population of different regions.[1] This standard shape would long remain nearly fixed if it were not for the appearance of the dynamic influences which are so active within the area we are studying. [1] It is obvious that capital as well as population is distributed with uneven density over the territory occupied by society; but the movement of capital is less obstructed than that of a great body of people, and moreover it is chiefly the fact that the people are not dispersed over the area in a natural way which creates the chief obstacle to the moving of capital. It goes easily when it accompanies a migration of laborers.