It will help us to a clearer view of the meaning of distribution if we think of the real income to be distributed as a stream or flow which is constantly being produced by the agents of production and which is being divided as rapidly as it is produced.

It will aid in this conception of distribution to think of production as a river whose waters are the goods in process of preparation for consumption. From some of the headwaters of this economic river the mineral ores are secured; from other headwaters come timber and the products of agriculture. The forces driving the waters of this economic river down the valley represent the physical and chemical and vital forces of nature which aid, under man's direction, in the production of goods. As the raw products from the headwaters move slowly down the stream they are wrought into new forms by the forces of production. After various transformations the waters of the river; that is, the economic goods, reach the point where they are ready to minister to human wants. At this point in the stream the results of production become the real income of distribution. At the point of distribution let us imagine the river divided into four channels, called rent and wages and interest and profits. These four channels do not lead the waters of the economic river to the sea, but instead we shall imagine them each immediately divided into innumerable flumes, such as are seen in an irrigated country. Each of these flumes brings a constant supply of real income to some individual laborer or landlord, or capitalist or enterpriser. And if an individual happens to be not only a laborer but also a capitalist and possibly a landlord, and enterpriser as well, he will receive his income stream not from one flume alone but from two or three or four flumes. And when the individual consumers have abstracted the satisfactions from the materials in which they are embodied, these materials are evaporated as is the water on an irrigated ranch and they finally find themselves back at the headwaters of the river, ready once more to come down the stream and to embody the satisfactions which consumers need.

To carry the analogy with irrigation one stage further, the various recipients of real income are for the most part dissatisfied with the volume of income that comes through their flumes. Each is struggling to increase his own income stream with the result that there is a constant fluctuation in the amount that goes into the various flumes. And sometimes the possessors of neighboring flumes organize and by cooperative effort succeed in getting for themselves a larger share of the contents of their channel than they have received before. And sometimes their organization is so powerful as to compel a widening of their main channel with a consequent increase of flow into this channel and decrease of flow into the other three main channels.