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moreover, are not among "the original and indestructible powers of the soil," and anything paid for their use, is excluded from the denomination of Rent by Mr. Ricardo's definition.

"Though land is not the produce of industry," says Mr. J. S. Mill, "most of its valuable properties are so. Labour is not only requisite for using, but almost equally so for fashioning the instrument." Mr. Mill probably means by valuable, simply useful. In the signification we have attached to value, it would be a mere truism to say that all valuable properties of land, or any other object, are the produce of labour. He is entirely correct in calling land an instrument. It is a great machine, differing from others in the circumstance that it is immovable. But, like other machines, whatsoever of its force is due to the past operation of natural agents, having been gratuitously produced, must be gratuitously parted with, in exchange, and gratuitously lent. Such is that accumulation of organic and inorganic matter, which constitutes its fertility, and gives it what Mr. Ricardo calls its original and indestructible powers.

We have shown that, so far from there being in land any residuum of value attributable to such powers, it is, like other capital, always exchanging for less labour than has been expended in giving it value; and that all other consequences which attend this fact, are found in connection with the use of land, and the partition of its products. Henceforth we shall disregard the notion of a distinction between capital incorporated in land, and movable capital in any other shape, as to their essential laws.

CHAPTER V.

WAGES.

THE laws which govern the partition, between those who lend the capital and those who lend the muscular force, of the products which result from their combination, have been deduced in the preceding chapters. The subject, however, is so important as to justify its treatment as a separate head, and in other relations than that of proportion.

Labour is what every one has to sell. They who desire to buy it, naturally seek to obtain it at the lowest absolute price; and it is habitually called cheap or dear, by reference to the quantity of coin which is exchanged for a given number of hours of exertion. On the other hand, the man who offers it for sale compares the quantity of exertion which he intends, or is expected to give to his task, with the quantity of necessaries and comforts he is to obtain for it-things often very different in kind from those upon which his labour is to be expended. The proportion which Wages bear to Profit being practically adjusted before the latter are ascertained, it is the present and definite quantum, not the future and undetermined ratio, to which men's minds are mainly directed in the operations of business; and this fact has given the same direction, for the most part, to the inquiries of Economists. Mr. Ricardo, indeed, and some of his followers, treat wages as high or low, in reference to the proportion they bear to the entire produce. It is in this sense that he declares "There is no other way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down;" and that Mr. M'Culloch says, "That profits vary inversely as wages that is, they fall when wages rise, and rise when wages fall." The latter gentleman testified before a Committee of Parliament, that "The whole and only effect of a French manufacturer getting his labour for less than an English manufacturer, is to enable him to make more profit than the English manufacturer can, but not to lower the price of his goods;" and that the circumstance "would have no effect whatever on the price of the commodities

produced in either country." We believe this to have been less than the truth, in the sense which Mr. M'Culloch intended to attach to the words "high wages;" for high proportional wages are the index of cheap production. The Committee, however, understood him to mean by high wages, a large amount; and, although in this sense his testimony was paradoxical, they appear to have felt so much deference for his authority and that of Ricardo, as to have wavered in their own convictions. Mr. Ricardo has not always himself succeeded in his writings, in using the words as indicative of proportion and not of quantity. There is no doubt that his authority has been supposed to be on the side of the common error, that high wages, in the ordinary sense that is to say, a liberal amount, estimated in money or in the necessaries of life-are incompatible with high profits, and that whatever is taken from one is added to the other. There is as little doubt that this opinion has had a pernicious influence upon the policy of England. Mr. Huskisson, in his speech of April 28, 1825, on the revision of the Corn Laws, told the House of Commons, "If capital had not a fair remuneration here, it would seek for it in America. To give it a fair. remuneration, the price of labour must be kept down." There is no ambiguity here. When, in 1846, the views of Mr. Huskisson prevailed, and the Corn Laws were repealed, it was that the price of labour might be kept down. It is believed by many that their repeal was advantageous to the United States, because it enabled us to exchange our grain in the English markets for cloths and iron wrought by low-priced labour, instead of exchanging them for cloths and iron made from our native materials, and wrought by high-priced labour at home. Which is true economy, depends in part upon the question, how far low-priced labour and cheap labour are the same thing.

We mean by labour, the exertion of human powers, physical and mental; by wages, the quantity of food, clothing, and other necessaries and conveniences, actually obtained in exchange for such exertion. They are usually obtained in the first instance in the shape of money, or whatever answers as the current representative of value, which the labourer exchanges for so much as he can of material commodities, or social services, contributing to his enjoy

ment. We find the rate of wages, therefore, ordinarily stated at their money price. But the circulating medium is itself a standard which varies from time to time, in its relation to other commodities. Great changes have taken place in the amount of labour necessary to procure a given quantity of gold or silver, by efforts directed to that immediate purpose, in mining, washing sand in California, and the like methods. Men will not consent, for a long period, to obtain a less quantity of potatoes by planting and digging them, than they could obtain by digging for gold to exchange for potatoes; nor will they saw wood for less gold than they are able to get by washing sand-all the risks, inconveniences, loss of time in removing themselves to the placers, and other compensating circumstances duly taken into account. We can see that, as a general fact, the improvements in machinery of all kinds, mining, transportation, &c., has had a constant tendency to reduce the amount of labour requisite for procuring the precious metals, but in a somewhat smaller degree than in the commodities of prime necessity; and, therefore, the same money-price of labour indicates a greater command of the necessaries of life at a late than at an early period. Sudden changes, like the influx of gold and silver from America soon after its discovery, and the recent one from California and Australia, require an allowance, in comparing the prices of labour in periods antecedent and subsequent to them, which it is difficult to estimate with any precision. Such considerations enforce the propriety of looking at the food, clothing, dwellings, and general condition of the labourers in remote periods, as the only practical test of the rate of their wages, while they justify us in regarding the ratio of money-prices in times nearly contemporaneous, as very nearly corresponding with that of the actual enjoyments of the labourer.

There is a necessary relation between the wages of labour and its efficiency, which prevents the former from being fixed at any arbitrary price. Thus, Mr. Malthus says,

"The command of a certain quantity of food is absolutely necessary to the labourer, in order to support himself and such a family as will sustain merely a stationary population. Consequently, if poorer lands, which required more labour, were successively taken into cultivation, it would not be possible for the corn wages of each individual labourer to be diminished in proportion to the diminished produce; a greater proportion of the whole

would necessarily go to labour, and the rate of profits would continue regularly falling, till the accumulation of capital had ceased."

Such wages are ordinarily spoken of by the followers of Malthus and Ricardo, as necessary wages. It is obvious that, according to their theory, wages must continually tend to come to this limit; and they teach that wages can never exceed this rate,* except temporarily; for, if they should chance at any time to exceed it, they would stimulate an increase of population sufficient to reduce them again. In this view, the labouring population are regarded as so many animals, with definite, never-increasing wants, and doomed by eternal laws to remain in the same condition themselves, and to beget children who are never to rise above it. It draws an impassable line between the castes of labourers and of capitalists, -impassable at least in one direction, for the labourer can never climb above it, though the capitalist may possibly fall below.

Such, however, is not the necessity to which we refer. It is one more directly physical, and it regards a labourer, not as a determinate unit of force, but as a machine of varying powers, directed by an intellect of varying degrees of enlightenment, set in motion and kept in motion by a will, that varies in intensity with the attractive power of the things it aims at.

To regard first the purely mechanical nature of man. We have seen that food performs the double office of maintaining animal warmth, and of supplying the waste of muscular and nervous tissues which every exertion of force produces. Clothing also serves to maintain animal warmth; so that a man sufficiently clad requires a less amount of food than one who is not. The food that will just keep alive a man insufficiently clad, will keep a well-clothed man at a healthy temperature, and leave a surplus, which enables him to exert muscular force. Clothing being supplied, a given quantity of food can produce a fixed quantity of animal motive power, and it can produce no more. Thus it has been calculated, from the quantity of carbon, &c., consumed by an adult taking moderate exercise,

*The permanent remuneration of the labourers depends on what we have called their habitual standard; the extent of the requirements which, as a class, they insist on satisfying before they choose to have children.” -J. S. Mill: Political Economy, vol. 2, page 278.

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