p Julian Kautz considers Bastiat one of the most outstanding minds engaged during recent years in a study of political economy.  [516•***  One cannot agree with this appraisal. Bastiat undoubtedly possessed the ability of clear and perhaps even brilliant exposition, but his thoughts were always so superficial and his arguments so feeble that he cannot be considered a brilliant man of science. He was nothing more than a brilliant advocate of capitalist exploitation. It is his outstanding defence of that exploitation that has ensured him a strong and lengthy influence on very many friends of "social peace”. It is in this sense—and only in this— that Julian Kautz is right in calling Bastiat’s work important and fruitful.  [516•****  Indeed, Bastiat’s influence on the economists 517 of the more or less conservative trend has always been far stronger than is thought by many of those who are amazed by his admirable but hardly consoling superficiality, even if the latter is necessary in a way. Luigi Cossa has remarked that the influence of the healthy part of Bastiat’s ideas has found expression, not so much in the works of his pupils as in the overall trend of the majority of our contemporary French economists, as well as of a considerable part of their German and Italian counterparts.  [517•*  By "healthy part" Cossa understands "a rebuttal of the sophistry of the Protectionists and the Socialists”. We have already seen that, with Bastiat, all refutation of socialist “sophistries” rests on a flimsy foundation. But that is not the crux of the matter. Cossa is right when he says that Bastiat’s overall trend continues to live on in the writings of very many economists in various countries. A particularly strong and deep impression was produced by his “admirable” and “necessary” law of the distribution of products between the workers and the capitalists. It is noteworthy that the “discovery” of this law has been ascribed to Bastiat even in the homeland of Carey himself, from whom the French economist undoubtedly borrowed both the law and its exposition. For instance, the eminent American statistician Edward Atkinson has frankly stated that though he has had, in general, little time "for the reading of books or the consideration of theories of wages”,  [517•**  he thinks that Bastiat was the first to found a correct theory of the relations between the interests of the workers and the employers. "Many years ago,” he says, "a single phrase in Bastiat’s Harmonies economiques became engraved upon my mind, and by its application I have been enabled to observe the phenomena of wages in the course of my business life with much clearer insight. It is this: ’In proportion to the increase of capital, the absolute share of the total product falling to the capitalist is augmented, but his relative share is diminished; while, on the contrary, the share of laborer is increased both absolutely and relatively.’~"  [517•***  Atkinson has borrowed this passage as an epigraph to his essay, "What Makes the Rate of Wages”, and, inspired by Bastiat, he has, on the basis of certain data referring to the American iron and steel industry, drawn up a table which, as he puts it, can even be called "an indicator of progress from poverty of the workman and progress toward poverty of the capitalist".  [517•****  In this new 518 wording, Bastiat’s admirable law sheds a considerable part of its consoling nature by arousing in the reader excessively gloomy misgivings regarding the future fate of the capitalists in capitalist society. However, the dispassionate scholars, with their ignorance of everything except the interests of pure science, and without being embarrassed by compassion for the poor capitalists, willingly quote from Atkinson’s book. Thus we meet with frequent references to it in the book by Professor Schultze-Gavernitz on LargeScale Production, which, according to Mr. P. Struve, is "perhaps the most thorough monographical study of the social history of British industry".  [518•*  This "thorough study" of the economics of the British cotton industry has led Schultze-Gavernitz to the conviction that although the increase in the overall national product gives to the share of labour and capital as absolutely greater quantities, the participation of capital therein diminishes relatively, while the participation of labour increases relatively. "Labour receives an ever greater share of the entire national product,” says Schultze-Gavernitz. "It is beginning more and more to get what is left after the payment of the shares of interest and profits."  [518•**  This is the selfsame consoling law of Carey– Bastiat, and it is strange that Mr. P. Struve has failed, or not wished, to note this in his preface—in general very poorly reasoned—to Schultze-Gavernitz’s book. It is also useless to add that the admirable and consoling law of distribution has led our grave German to the same gratifying conclusions that it once led the frivolous Frenchman to. "The social consequences of the process we have described has consisted in an equalising of opposites in property,” Schultze-Gavernitz assures us; "without making the wealthy richer or the indigent poorer, it leads to the reverse, as has been statistically proved in respect of Britain."  [518•***  Hence it is very simple to arrive at the inference on "social peace”, to which Herr Professor had already dedicated a separate two-volume work of research.   [518•**** 

Herr Schultze-Gavernitz considers it the more necessary to draw his readers’ attention to the consoling conclusions he has arrived at because, in his words, the fact of the growing distance between the rich and the poor in the sense attached to it by Marx and Engels is recognised even in circles which in general, come out as decisive opponents of Marxism.  [518•*****  But in this, he almost 519 falls into exaggeration. As far as we know, circles hostile to Marxism are over more becoming imbued with the consoling -consciousness of the incontestability and the “necessity” of the Carey-Bastiat law. Practically every self-respecting bourgeois scholar is more than glad if he has any opportunity—in any piece of “scientific” research—to expatiate on the narrowing gap between rich and poor. The “blunting” of the contradiction between the capitalists and the workers is now a theme very much in vogue in bourgeois economic literature.