to tell upon the labor market. But the fourth element, the daily cost of necessaries, alters sometimes largely in one day; and upon this, therefore, must be charged the main solution of those vicissitudes in wages which are likely to occur within one man's life. The other forces vary, by degrees fine and imperceptible, so as to affect the condition. of working men deeply and radically from century to century. But such an effect, though sure, and important to the historical grandeur of nations, is not rapid enough to be concurrent with the corresponding changes upon other functions of productive power. We look for an agency upon wages able to keep abreast of these other agencies, fitted by its easy motion for receiving their effects, and for returning to them a continual modification from itself. Here, therefore, it is, upon this one force out of four which control the price of labor; viz. upon the poor man's household consumption for the diet of his family, for their clothing, their lodging, for the annual dividend upon the cost and maintenance of his furniture, (amongst which only the beds and bedding are expensive,) for his fuel, (sometimes, from land-carriage, costly,) for his candles and his soap, with a small allowance for medicine and medical attendance, and too often (though most naturally) a large one for strong liquors, upon these items in a poor man's expenditure it is, that the main agency of change settles,schooling for his children he generally obtains gratis. Now the reader is aware, that, according to Ricardo's view, an expenditure on this humble scale is chiefly determined by the costs of production upon the land. Yet why? The furniture and the clothes (with the exception of the woollen or iron parts amongst them) do not arise from the domestic soil, though much of the food does; yet, even amongst that, the tea and the sugar (two very important articles) are wholly foreign; and all the other articles, except fuel, are trivial in price. Certainly it must be granted that the habit of estimating the laborer's expenses by the cost of his diet, (nay, exclusively by one item of his diet, bread,) is radically false; and of that Ricardo is sensible, though apparently he does not allow sufficiently for the true proportion held. The corn-law incendiaries here, as everywhere when they approach the facts or the principles of the question, betray an ignorance which could not be surpassed if the discussion were remitted to Ashantee or Negroland. They calculate a change of ten per cent upon wheat as if it meant a change of ten per cent on wages, (though, by the way, often denying elsewhere that wages at all sympathize with the price of food.) Now, suppose the total food of a working man's family to cost two fifths of his total wages, and suppose that of these two fifths one moiety, i. e. one fifth of the wages, is spent upon flour, and oatmeal, and bread; in that case a change of ten per cent upon wheat will amount to one tenth upon one fifth of the total wages. But one tenth of one fifth is one fiftieth, or two per cent upon the total wages; so trivial is the result upon wages from a change in wheat which is very considerable. Suppose the change upon wheat to be even as much as fifteen shillings less upon sixty, i. e. twenty-five per cent, then the total change will be one fourth of one fifth, which is one twentieth, that is, five per cent upon the total wages; and everybody is aware that a fall of fifteen shillings upon sixty, is greater than we often experience in any single season. Ricardo, indeed, attempts to justify the supposition, that, as a natural state of things, an English laborer might spend one half of his wages upon wheat, (p. 106,) and the other half upon "other things," by alleging (p. 97) that "in rich countries a laborer, by the sacrifice of a very small quantity only of his food, is able to provide liberally for all his other wants." No; not necessarily. That remark arises only through a neglect (habitual to Ricardo) of the antagonist principle, which is eternally at work to compensate the declensions of land, by countervailing improvements of endless kinds: so that at this time, all over western Europe, there cannot be a doubt that, with a far worse soil as the regulating soil for cost, wheat is cheaper than it was a thousand years ago. Yet, if Ricardo were right in supposing a laborer to spend half his wages upon wheat only, then his beer, bacon, cheese, milk, butter, tea, and sugar, must proportionably cost, at the very least, all the rest of his wages; so that for clothes, lodging, fuel, to say nothing of other miscellanies, he would have no provision at all. But these are romantic estimates, and pardonable in Ricardo from his city life, which had denied him, until his latest years, all opportunities of studying the life of laborers. Meantime it will not be denied, that flour and bread compose an important item upon the laborer's housekeeping, though not by possibility so important as Ricardo chooses to fancy. Now then, so far as this flour and bread are obtained from a soil continually worse, (since, 1st, population forces culture for ever upon worse soils; and, 2dly, the very worst always gives the price for the whole,) so far the flour and bread would be continually dearer were there no such compensating law as that which I, almost too frequently, have noticed, for the reason that Ricardo too systematically forgets it. Let us also forget it for the present, so as to pursue the principle of wages more clearly by pushing it into an extreme, which in practice does but rarely take place to that extent. On this basis the following short extract from Ricardo, (pp. 105, 106,) accompanied by a single word of commentary, will explain the whole of what is peculiar to Ricardo in his theory of wages: "When wheat was at £ 4 per quarter, suppose the laborer's wages to be £24 per annum, or the value of six quarters of wheat, and suppose half his wages to be expended on wheat, and the other half (or £ 12) on other things, he would receive He would receive these wages to enable him to live When wheat was at £4, 10s., three quarters of When at £4 16s., three quarters of wheat would £12 00 12 00 £ 24 00 £ 13 10 0 12 00 £ 25 10 0 £14 80 12 00 £ 26 80 "In proportion as corn became dear, he" (the laborer) "would receive less corn wages, but his money would always increase; whilst his enjoyments, on the above supposition, would be precisely the same. But, as other commodities would be raised in price, in proportion as raw produce entered into their composition, he would have more to pay for some of them. Although his tea, sugar, soap, candles, and house-rent would probably be no dearer, he would pay more for his bacon, cheese, butter, linen, shoes, and cloth; and therefore, even with the above increase of wages, his situation would be comparatively worse." The principle of advance is this : - When wheat was at 80s. per quarter, the laborer had received £24; when wheat rose to 90s., it might seem that he should receive £27; because 80:90:: £24: £27. But, in fact, he receives only one half of the difference, viz. 30s. His wages are now £25, 10s. Why is this? Because only one half of his original wages had been spent on wheat. But the full development of this principle I refer to the chapter on Rent, that I may not be obliged to repeat myself. CHAPTER IV. SECTION I.-RENT. THE particular situation of this chapter in Ricardo, placed immediately after the chapter on Value, is not without significance. By placing the consideration of Rent where he does place it, he is to be understood as viewing Rent under the idea of a disturbance to Value. Under that fiction, or at least under that relation, selected from other relations equally conspicuous, he brings up the question before his own bar. For the ordinary and continual disturbances of value, growing out of the varying proportions between fixed and circulating capital, Ricardo had allowed, in a striking part of his opening chapter. He had shown conclusively, that the universal principle of varying quantity in the producing labor as the cause of varying price, is subject to two modifications; as, first, that the price will be greater in the case where circulating capital predominates, than in the opposite case where fixed capital predominates; secondly, that the tendency will be in the same direction, according to the degrees in which the fixed |