5th, the employers themselves, in so far as they personally conduct and control business operations, their remuneration being styled the "wages of supervision and management."

Now to the remuneration of each of these five classes the economists generally, as I have said, apply the term Wages, although only the third and fourth classes do in fact receive a remuneration for their services distinet from that which they receive for the use of their capital; being therefore the only classes which receive "wages" in the ordinary meaning of that word; and although, in the second place, classes 4 and 5 thus grouped have interests as strongly opposed as human interests can well become.

The explanation of such a classification would fairly seem to be that which has been indicated, namely, that economists have assumed as of course that the industrial functions which they distinguish in the production of wealth will necessarily characterize the industrial classes interested in the distribution of wealth. Otherwise it would scarcely be possible that a classification should be seriously proposed, for the solution of the problems of distribution, which groups together employer and employed; the peasant proprietor, the tenant occupier, and the hired agricultural hand; the navvy and the railroad king; the day-laborer and the domestic servant with a Stewart, an Astor, and a Rothschild.

It is true that labor, in a certain sense of that word, is common to these and all other classes in production; and this fact of itself ought to be enough to show that it is not labor which should be taken to distinguish classes in distribution. It is not what these classes have in common, but those things by which they differ from each other, which should be made the means of characterizing them as claimants to the product of industry.

It might fairly be expected that after insisting thus peremptorily that the question of Wages is a question in the

Distribution of Wealth, and that, in distribution, not industrial functions, but industrial classes, should be considered, one would in a treatise on Wages at once proceed to state the problem of distribution, and to define the wages class as a party thereto. But, on the contrary, I shall be obliged to take up and explain with much particularity certain principles of Production and Population which can not safely be assumed for our present purposes, and also to deal at some length with a current theory respecting the remuneration of labor, which squarely blocks the way to a philosophy of Wages.

CHAPTER II.

NOMINAL AND REAL WAGES.

A DISTINCTION which needs to be apprehended with great clearness and held strongly in the mind, throughout all discussion of Wages, is that between Nominal and Real Wages.

Real Wages are the remuneration of the hired laborer as reduced to the necessaries, comforts, or luxuries of life. These are what the laborer works for; these are truly his wages. The money he receives under his contract with his employer is only a means to that end; sometimes, as it proves, a most delusive means. If, as is the case with the great majority of his class, he spends every week or every month his entire earnings, he can see for himself, no matter how little given to reflection, that his wages are not his money, but what his money brings. If, again, he is frugal and forehanded enough to save a portion of his wages, and hoard it up or put it out at interest, it is still true, though not perhaps so evident, that this portion of his also wages means, in some near or distant future, “ food, clothing, lodging, and firing" to himself or to his family. The habitual miser, the person who loves money for its own sake, is one of the most exceptional of human beings, the victim, doubtless, of a distinct form of disease as truly as the subject of alcoholism.

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But this reduction of Nominal to Real Wages is not an easy matter." No one," says Mr. G. R. Porter in his Progress of the Nation, "unless he shall have made the at

tempt to obtain information of this kind, can be aware of the difficulties opposed to his success."

Real may differ from Nominal Wages by reason of:
1st. Variations in the purchase-power of money.
2d. Varieties in the form of payment.

3d. Opportunities for extra earnings.

4th. The greater or less regularity of employment. 5th. The longer or shorter duration of the laboring power.

I shall consider these causes1 in the order in which they are here given.

I. The purchase-power of money may vary by reason of changes in the supply of, or in the demand for, money. First, of changes in the supply of money.

(a) Changes of Coinage. If a given amount of gold or silver be rendered into a greater number of coins than formerly, it is evident that each coin will purchase fewer commodities. Now when it is stated that the English "pound" of to-day contains less than one third the standard silver it contained in 1300 A.D.-12 oz. of English silver coin metal being 'now rendered into 66 shillings, whereas a shilling is nominally the twentieth part of a "pound"-and that the French livre of 1789 contained less than one sixty-sixth part of the silver implied in its name, the importance of

To the considerations enumerated must be added, as Mr. Ward has shown, still another, in the case of laborers working by the piece. "When piece-work is done, you have to consider not only the price per piece paid, but also the conditions, as of machinery, etc. Thus the Hyde spinners in 1824 struck because they were getting less per piece than others, though all the time they were, by reason of improved machinery, actually earning more per day."-Workmen and Wages, p. 23.

The shilling in America suffered a still harder fate-twenty "York shillings" having the value of but $2.50, and 20 New-England shillings the value of $3.33. In Pennsylvania the “dollar" was, at different dates, worth 48. 6d. ; 58. 58 6d. 68. 68. 6d. ; 78.; 78. 6d.-Col-well's Ways and Means of Payment, p. 99.

this discrimination in historical comparisons of wages becomes manifest.

Even in comparison of contemporary wages, care has often to be taken lest coins of the same name but of differing value be confounded. Thus, in the United States, the York shilling (eight to a dollar) and the New-England shilling (six to a dollar) were until recently liable to be taken for each other in calculation of prices. In the same way the English penny differs from the penny in use in the island of Jersey, of which it takes thirteen to make a shilling.

(b) Changes in the amount of the precious metals in circulation. The history of the production of gold and silver is a history of often intermitted and always highly spasmodic activity. Thus in the year 800 there is supposed to have been on hand gold and silver to the value, as expressed in American gold coin, of $1,790,000,000. Between that date and 1492, the date of the discovery of America, with its vast reserves of mined and resources of unmined treasure, the estimated product was $345,000,000. Between 1492 and 1803 the product is given as $5,820,700,000; between 1803 and 1848, as $2,484,000,000; between 1848 and 1868, as $3,571,000,000. The effect upon prices wrought by such wholesale changes in the volume of the precious metals has long been discussed, and with great fulness, by economical writers, as influencing the wages of labor, producing a wide divergence between real and nominal wages in comparison of different periods; but we owe to Prof. Cairnes1 the demonstration that this cause is also influential in creating disturbances in contemporary wages, the effect upon prices being produced very irregularly as between countries, and as between different classes of commodities in the same country.

(c) Fluctuations in the paper substitutes for coin.-A paper currency purporting to be convertible into coin, but in

1 Essays on the Gold Question, 1858-60.