natural forces and resources are brought into his service. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

(5) The value of the land of a country is chiefly-or in truth entirely due to the labor that has been wisely expended upon it, and is proportional to that. The price of a Belgian farm, for instance, is twelve times as great as that of the same amount of waste land in the same country, and the latter brings even that nominal price only because (1) it furnishes a field for labor to produce utilities possible but as yet non-existent; (2) because the labor already expended on other adjacent pieces of land, and the growth of numbers and of the power of association, have made it possible to bring this one under tillage. Were the same piece of land to be transferred to the Andes, its market value would be nil.

In fine, if in any case a people, with the strength of numbers and the strength of skill, should come to such a state that great wealth should be found side by side with deep poverty and its accompaniments, misery and sordid vice, the cause of such a state of things is not to be sought in "the pressure of population upon land and food," but in bad national thrift. Somebody is to blame!

CHAPTER SEVENTH.

THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF LABOR.

§ 115. The industrial age, in which national economy has become a science, is also the democratic age, in which the governing class are no longer regarded as composing the state or possessing an exclusive right to direct its policy to the promotion of their own interests. It is no longer possible, therefore, to call a nation wealthy and prosperous because large masses of capital are in the hands of a few men, if the great body of the people are ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed, or struggling on the brink of pauperism. The prosperity of "the most numerous class, that is, the poorest," is coming ever more to the front as the great problem of modern statesmanship.

In an industrial age this problem resolves itself into the question of the rewards of labor. Modern governments can no longer undertake to support great numbers of people in idleness on the produce of the industry of other classes, as was done in the Greek republics and the Roman Empire. Those others, with the advance of political equality, claim equal rights and care. The aim of national economy is therefore to secure "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work," to all who are willing and able to work.

In modern industry, the operations are so complex in method and so extensive in scale that unassisted labor would be unable to undertake them. Those who by their savings, or by the inheritance of other men's savings, have come into the possession of a large amount of the results of past labor, naturally and necessarily take the work of organizing industry and directing its forces. These men are capitalists, and their accumulations are called capital.

§ 116. Of the net product of the joint application of labor and capital, what proportion should fall to labor and what to

capital? Is there a natural and necessary rate of distribution or does it vary arbitrarily according to the contract made?

The English economists generally accept the former alternative; they believe that there is a natural and necessary rate of wages; that no efforts of the workman can permanently raise wages above that rate, and no efforts of the capitalist can permanently depress them below it. For, say they, if wages be raised above the natural rate, the rate of increase in the population will be accelerated, and after a time the number of workmen will be so great that they will underbid each other for work, and the rate will be depressed again. If it be depressed below the natural rate by this or any other cause, then the rate of increase of the population will be diminished, and the labor market will be scantily supplied, so that wages must rise. Between the two extremes of this oscillation, there is a middle point of stability, -the natural rate of wages, that which will neither accelerate the growth of population till it surpasses the growth of capital, nor the reverse. This natural rate is the amount necessary to supply to the unmarried workman the real necessaries of life, and whatever other things his class regard as such.

The theory is commonly stated in another form, which also accepts a natural rate of wages, and one which is reached far more swiftly. All the money in a country that is available for the payment of labor is taken in the mass and called the wage fund. This fund is divided pretty equally among all the laborers in the country. The apparent inequalities in the distribution are not real; higher wages can always be traced to payment for undergoing danger or doing work that is disagreeable or discreditable, or work that involves special capacity or preparation. The amount of the fund to be divided depends upon the amount of capital in circulation. The rate of division depends upon the number of claimants. The workingmen have no power to increase the amount of the fund, but they can limit the number of those among whom it is divided, and on their doing so depends their welfare as a class.

This theory in both its shapes grows out of the supposed

THE HADES OF LABOR.

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"law of population," and must stand or fall with that. Like that, its motive is to show that the misery of the working classes is not to be attributed to any mismanagement on the part of the ruling class, but to the operation of natural and unavoidable laws. Its verdict is, "Nobody to blame," when the growth of a nation in wealth and numbers, and the distribution of wealth among those numbers, do not go on together.

The first form of the theory is fully refuted by the ascertained fact that the poorest classes are the most thriftless, and the least likely to take thought for the future. The second, by the proofs that workingmen actually have, by combination, raised the rate of wages, without any such increase of circulating capital, or the resulting "wage fund," as is here demanded. as a preliminary to that increase.

The facts are abundantly given by Mr. W. T. Thornton (On Labor, 1870), and by Mr. Cliffe Leslie (Systems of Land Tenure, 1868).

§ 117. If the English theory as to the relations of labor and capital be true, then there is no hope for the essential improvement of the workingman's condition so long as the existing order of society holds its ground. What labor gains on one side it for ever loses on the other, and as often as it rolls the Sisyphean rock-the rate of wages-up the hill, it rolls down again to crush and destroy the workman. All the old pictures of foiled effort, with which the Greeks peopled their Hades, become but pictures of the efforts of the working classes to raise their condition above the wretched standard called "natural wages."

Those who are striving to rouse the working classes to overthrow the frame-work of modern society and its economic basis, the right of property, are not slow to discern this. Thus the leader of the German socialists, Lasalle, based his fierce denunciations of modern civilization and its proprietary rights upon the recognised doctrines of the English school, claiming to be "equipped with all the knowledge of the age" on this subject. His chief opponent, his successful rival in the love and allegiance of the working classes of Germany, is Schultze-Delitzsch, who has devoted his life to showing the working classes that they

can improve their condition simply by removing unnatural obstacles to improvement, by availing themselves of the great drift of society towards an equality of condition, and without for an instant lifting their hands against the accumulations and the vested rights of the rich. In doing so, he ranged himself on the side of the German-American school of economists founded by List and represented by H. C. Carey, telling Herr Lasalle that if he had taken the pains to go over the whole field he would have found better teachers and better principles than those of Malthus and Ricardo.

"If any one object," he says, "that the economical principles of the writer are devoid of authority, it will suffice to answer that these principles have been established by the work of one of the most philosophic minds of our epoch, the celebrated American economist, Carey. That work is entitled Principles of Social Science. It was finished in 1860; some years later gave us a German translation of it (München, 1863-4, published by E. A. Fleischmann). We commend it to the public as one of the most eminent publications that have appeared in this branch of human knowledge.

"All that is false and damnable in the economic theories of the modern English school, especially those of Ricardo and Malthus,-theories which furnish the starting-point for the thesis defended by Lasalle,—there meets with a triumphant refutation; and it is truly astonishing that our opponent, armed with all the knowledge of the age, had not even known of the aforementioned labors of the eminent man, who, during the last twenty years, has discovered a great number of truths that are now accepted as axioms in political economy."

John Stuart Mill, in his Autobiography, shows us that the gloomy outlook for the future of the majority of mankind, presented to his mind when he studied the world through the spectacles made for his eyes by Malthus and Ricardo, led him to at least approximate to the theory of the St. Simonian socialists. They proposed to abolish all rights of inheritance; to reconstruct the government out of the ablest men in each of the professions; to make the state everybody's heir, and to redistribute all property as fast as its present possessors died. In Mr. Mill's Principles (ii, xiii, 2) he speaks of "the industrial system prevailing in this country and regarded by many writers as the ne plus ultra of civilization," as "irrevocably condemned," unless it prove itself competent to solve the population question by bringing sufficient motives to self-restraint to bear upon the classes "dependent on the wages of hired labor."

§ 118. The English theory that the power of competition