The importance to Economic study of assigning every item of Economic phenomena, Distributive as well as Productive, to its appropriate Economic category--Labor or Land in Production and Wages or Rent in Distribution--cannot be lightly ignored nor carelessly trifled with. Nor can it be too strongly emphasized. Without such assignments Economic phenomena are like printers’ “pi”; so assigned, they may be studied with precision. III. TRADE The Distribution of Wealth, as well as its Production, is effected through Trade. As in the Productive Process from the very beginning of Labor specialization up to the point of delivery to ultimate consumers, so in the process of Distribution, Trade is the continuous and the culminating agency. It determines the kind of Wealth and the quantity that each factor in Production shall receive. We have seen that Labor as a whole, a social unit, produces Wealth from Land and that this activity and this result are governed by natural Economic law--by natural relations of Economic effect to Economic cause. We have seen also that a correlative natural law, a correlative connection of effect to cause, constantly allocates one portion of the total Product to the Labor factor and another portion to the Land factor. We may readily see, moreover, that those two primary allocations subdivide into almost infinitesimal and extremely confusing secondary categories, comprising every variety of Labor, every variety of Land, every variety of Wealth, every variety of Economic desire. It is to satisfy those desires out of that continuous flow of Wealth that the infinitude of processes indicated in the next preceding Lesson enter into the comprehensive Productive Process which includes delivery to ultimate consumers, and that an infinitude of corresponding processes enter into Distribution. Many of those processes overlap, playing now a part in Production and now in Distribution. Some of them are natural, some are customary, some are legalistic. But all are subject to the cooperation or to the obstruction of natural law as manifestly as is the navigation of a sailing vessel on the ocean. In so far as the customary or the legalistic do not conform to natural Economic law, natural penalizations inevitably result; in so far as they do conform to natural Economic law, the results are socially as well as individually beneficial. As with gravitation in the physical universe, so with its correspondent force in the Economic domain. Not only, then, are the minute details of Labor specialization merged in Productive wholes and delivered in their completeness to ultimate consumers by means of Trade, as we learned in the next preceding Lesson, but, also by means of Trade, the two great divisions of Wealth (Wages and Rent) are assigned respectively to Labor interests and to Land interests in proportions determined by comparisons of Value.