vement of capital and
labor from employments that yield small returns to those that
give larger ones. Capital migrates freely from place to place
and from occupation to occupation. If one industry is
abnormally profitable, capital seeks it, increases and cheapens
its product, and reduces its profits to the prevailing level.
Profits tend to a general uniformity.

Wages are said to tend to equality only within limits. The transfer of
labor from one employment to another is checked by barriers.

What we find, in effect [continues Professor Cairnes], is not a
whole population competing indiscriminately for all
occupations, but a series of industrial layers, superimposed on
one another, within each of which the various candidates for
employment possess a real and effective power of selection,
while those occupying the several strata are, for all purposes
of effective competition, practically isolated from each other.
We may perhaps venture to arrange them in some such order as
this: first, at the bottom of the scale there would be the
large group of unskilled or nearly unskilled laborers,
comprising agricultural laborers, laborers engaged in
miscellaneous occupations in towns, or acting in attendance on
skilled labor. Secondly, there would be the artisan group,
comprising skilled laborers of the secondary order--carpenters,
joiners, smiths, masons, shoemakers, tailors, hatters, etc.,
etc.--with whom might be included the very large class of small
retail dealers, whose means and position place them within the
reach of the same industrial opportunities as the class of
artisans. The third layer would contain producers and dealers
of a higher order, whose work would demand qualifications only
obtainable by persons of substantial means and fair educational
opportunities; for example, civil and mechanical engineers,
chemists, opticians, watchmakers, and others of the same
industrial grade, in which might also find a place the superior
class of retail tradesmen; while above these there would be a
fourth, comprising persons still more favorably circumstanced,
whose ampler means would give them a still wider choice. This
last group would contain members of the learned professions, as
well as persons engaged in the various careers of science and
art, and