be in a place different from that in which his commodity is. Hence a change in the person etc. of the buyer very readily necessitates in the workman a radical change of life, and that the levelling adjustment of local excess and want is rendered so difficult in the case of this commodity. Hence, it is that, if in the long run the exchange of labor against wages is to be an equitable one (§110), the master of labor must, so to speak, incorporate part of his own personality into it, have a heart for faithful workmen and thus attach them to himself.

SECTION CLXI.

WAGES OF LABOR.- THE MINIMUM OF WAGES.

Human labor cannot, any more than any other commodity, be supplied, in the long run, at a price below the cost of production.12 The cost of production here embraces not only the necessary or customary means of subsistence of the workman himself, but also of his family; that is, of the coming generation of workmen. The number of the latter depends essentially on the demand for labor. If this demand be such that it may be satisfied by an average of six children to a family, the rate of wages must be such as to support the workman himself and to cover the cost of bringing up six children. Where it is

" W. Thornton, On Labour, its wrongful Claims and rightful Dues, its actual, Present and possible Future, 1869, II, ch. 1. Harrison, Fortnightly Review, III, 50.

8 Just as the husband binds himself in marriage. While in concubinage there is apparent equality, it costs the woman a much greater sacrifice than the man.

Compare Engel's beautiful lecture on the cost of labor to itself (Selbstkosten self-cost), Berlin, 1866.

'Wolkoff zealously and rightly argues, that the minimum wages is not the taux naturel of wages. (Lectures, 118 ff., 284.) von Thünen also divides wages into two component parts that which the workman must lay out in his support in order to continue able to work, and that which he receives for his actual exertion. (Isolirter Staat., II, 1, 92 seq.)

3 Gasparin distinguishes five periods in the career of a workman generally: a, he is supported by his parents; b, he supports himself and is in a

customary for the wife and child, as well as for the father, to work for wages, the father does not need to earn the entire support of the family, and hence individual wages may be smaller. But if it were to fall below the cost mentioned above, it would not be long before increased mortality and emigration, and a diminution of marriages and births would produce a diminution of the supply; the result of which would be, if the demand remained the same, a renewed rise of wages.

Conversely, it would be more difficult for the rate of wages to be maintained long much above that same cost, in proportion as the gratification of the sexual appetite was more generally considered the highest pleasure of sense, and the love of parents

condition to save something; c, he marries, and supports his children with trouble; d, the children are able to work, and the father lives more comfortably; e, his strength and resources decline. (Villermé, Tableau de l'Etat physique et moral des Ouvriers, 1840, II, 387.)

+ Cantillon, Nature du Commerce etc., 1755, is of opinion that a day laborer, to bring up two children until they are grown, needs about as much as he does for his own support; and that his wife may, as a rule, support herself by her own work. (42 ff.) In Germany, it is estimated that, in the case of day laborers, a woman can earn only from / to 1⁄2 of what her husband does; mainly because she is so frequently incapacitated for work by preg nancy, nursing etc. (Rau, Lehrbuch, I, § 190.) In France, in 1832, a man working in the fields earned, on an average, 14 francs a day, the wife 34 of a franc (200 days to the year), the three children francs (250 days to the year), an aggregate of 650 francs per annum. (Morogues.) In England, the average amount earned in the country was for males, per annum, £27 17s.; munications relative to the Support and Maintenance of the Poor, 1834, p. LXXXVIII.) The wife of an English field hand, without children, earns

more than one with children. In the case of mothers, a difference of fewer or more children is unnoticeable in the effects on wages. (London Statist. Journal, 1838, 182.) In the spinning factories in Manchester, in 1834, children between 9 and 10 years of age were paid, weekly, from 2s. 9d. to 2s. rod.; between 10 and 12, from 3s. 6d. to 3s. 7d.; between 12 and 14, from 58. 8d. to 5s. 9d.; between 14 and 16, from 78. 5d. to 7s. 6d. (Report of the Poor Commissioners, 204.) Those manufactures which require great physical strength, like carpet and sail-cloth weaving, and those carried on in the open air and in all kinds of weather, allow of no such family competition and debasement of wages. (Senior in the Report of the parliamentary Committee on Hand Weavers, 1841.)

for their children as the most natural human duty. As Adam Smith says, where there is a great demand for men, there will always be a large supply of them.3

SECTION CXLII.

COST OF PRODUCTION OF LABOR.

The idea conveyed by the expression necessaries of life is, within certain limits, a relative one. In warm countries, a workman's family needs less clothing, shelter, fuel and even food than in cold countries. This difference becomes still more striking when the warm countries possess absolutely cheaper food as, for instance, rice, Turkish wheat, bananas etc. Here, evidently, other circumstances being the same, the rate of wages may be lower. The cultivation of the potato has operated in the same direction; since an acre of land planted with potatoes yields, on an average, twice as much food as the same acre planted with rye." In France, two

5

Similarly, J. Möser, Patriot. Phant., I, 40. Adam Smith infers from the following symptoms in a country that wages are higher there than the indispensable minimum, viz.: if wages in summer are higher than in winter, since it is seldom that enough is saved in summer to satisfy the more numerous wants of winter; if wages vary less from year to year and more from place to place than the means of subsistence, if they are high even where the means of subsistence are cheapest. (Wealth of Nat., I, ch. 8.)

'Explained since Liebig's time by the fact that a part of food is consumed to preserve animal heat: means of respiration in contradistinction to means of nutrition. Recent research has shown that in cold weather more urea and also more carbonic acid are given off; hence the means of supplying this deficit should be greater in cold weather than in warm. This more rapid transformation is wont, when nutrition is sufficient, to be accompanied by more energetic activity. (Moleschott, Physiologie der Nahrungsmittel, 1850, 47, 50, 83.)

This is opposed in part by the fact that a hot climate induces indolence, and that therefore he needs a greater incentive to overcome his disposition to idleness. Thus, in the cooler parts of Mexico, the rate of wages was 26 sous a day, in the warmer, 32 sous. (Humboldt, N. Espagne, III, 103.)

3 According to Engel, Jahrbuch für Sachsen, I, 419, on acres similarly situated and under similar conditions, the lowest yielded:

thirds of the population lived almost without animal food, on chestnuts, Indian corn, and potatoes (Dupin), while in England, malt, hops, sugar, brandy, tea, coffee, tobacco, soap, newspapers etc. are described as "articles chiefly used by the laboring classes." (Carey.)

The standard of decency of the working class also has great influence here. The use of blouses in Paris has nothing repulsive, nor that of wooden shoes in many of the provinces of France, nor the absence of shoes in lower Italy; while the English workman considers leather shoes indispensable, as he did only a short time ago a cloth coat. Compare infra, § 214.*

In Saxony, from 1838 to 1852, the average prices stood as follows:

Of Rye. Of Wheat. Of Potatoes.

(loc. cit.) The high price of protein in wheat depends probably on the more agreeable appearance and pleasanter taste of wheat flour; the still higher price of potato protein on the exceedingly easy mode of its preparation.

As regards food alone, the cost of the support of a plowman on Count Podewil's estate, reduced by Rau, Lehrbuch, § 191, to the unit of rye, is annually 1,655 lbs. of rye. According to Koppe, it is 1,952 lbs.; to Block, 2,300 lbs.; to Kleemann, from 1,888 to 2,552 lbs.; to Möllenger, 2,171 lbs. The first three estimate the cost in meat at 78, 160 and 60 pounds. Compare Block, Beitr. Z. Landgüterschätzungskunde, 1840, 6. Exhaustive estimates for all Prussian governmental districts in von Reden, Preussische Erwerbs, und Verkehrs. statistik, 1853, I, 177 ff., according to which the requirement, per family, va

SECTION CLXIII.

WAGES OF LABOR.- POWER OF THE WORKING CLASSES OVER THE RATE OF WAGES.

In this way, the working classes hold in their own hands one of the principal elements which determine the rate of wages; and it is wrong to speak of an "iron law" which, under

ries between 71 thalers in Gumbinnen and 204 thalers in Coblenz, the average being 105 thalers. According to more recent accounts, a laborer's family in East Prussia, gangmen not included, get along very well on 177 thalers per annum. (von der Goltz, Ländl. Arbeiterfrage, 1872, 9 ff.) In Mecklenburg, omitting Hofgänger, on 183 thalers. (Ann. des. patr. Vereins, 1865, No. 26.)

The necessary outlay of the family of an agricultural day laborer in England, in 1762, was estimated as follows: for bread and flour, £6 108. per annum; for vegetables and fruit, £1 128.; for fuel, light and soap, 2-98s.; for milk, butter and cheese, £1 1-65s.; for meat, £1 6s.; for house rent, 1-6s.; for clothing, bedding etc., 2-16s.; for salt, beer and colonial wares, 1-165s.; for medicine, expenses attending confinement of wife, etc., 1-6 s. (F. Wade, History of the middle and working Classes, 1853, 545.) Concerning 1796, compare Sir F. M. Eden, State of the Poor, I, 660, 1823; Lowe, on the present Condition of England. Compare on the receipts and expenses of ten working families in and about Mühlhausen, the tables in the Journal des Economistes, October, 1861, 50; and further Ducpétiaux, Budgets économiques des Classes ouvrières en Belgique, 1855. According to Playfair in Knop, Agriculturchemie, I, S10, ff., different classes of grown men need daily food.

Here I stands for a convalescent who can bear only enough to preserve life; 2, the condition of rest; 3, moderate motion of from 5 to 6 English miles' walk daily; 4, severe labor a walk of 20 English miles daily; 5, very severe labor to a day's walk of 14 English miles, with a load weighing 60 lbs. If the fat be given in terms of starch, the aggregate need of both substances in the case of 1 is 6.6 times as great as the need of plastic substance; in the case of 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively 5.7, 5.2, 4.8 and 4.0 times as much