ABSTRACT
THE traditional classification of incomes into rent, profits and wages or into four shares obtained by a slight modification of that classification has become so firmly implanted in the minds of most economic students that it seems almost shocking to suggest that it did not fall down from heaven as an inspired revelation but was evolved from circumstances with no claim to universality. Yet, in fact, without going further away in place or time, we may probably quite safely conjecture that no ancient Greek, Roman or Hebrew, nor even any medireval thinker, ever classified all income under these three heads. Aristotle, it may be said, had some idea of profit from trade and money-lending and of wages for labour, but these he regarded as unnatural methods of acquisition arising in a not very reputable way from exchange. Rent he does not think of at all, and we may be sure that it would not be thought of anywhere or at any time except in a small corner of the world for a small period of its history.
