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price be a shilling, or will it be a thousand pounds? You guess at the first would be too little, and the second too much. Perhaps so; but what makes you "guess this? Why, simply, your past experience. You fancy yourself ascertaining the price by the relation of supply to demand, and, in fact, you are ascertaining it by privately looking for the cost in past years; the very thing that you had pledged yourself to dispense with.

Now, mark how a man does really proceed in solving such a problem. He finds upon inquiry that an excess in the supply of wheat by one tenth, will cause a depreciation perhaps by one sixth: the accident of excess has told to the extent of a sixth. But of what? A sixth of what? Manifestly, a sixth upon the last price of wheat. The pretended result, that could be known by knowing the mere amount of excess, now turns out to be a mere function of the former cost, previous to the depreciation. But that price includes the whole difficulty; for always the price of wheat will express the cost in the first place, as the principal (oftentimes the sole) element. This call c. Then, secondly, the other (the movable) element of the price will represent any modification upon this c, by means of too much or too little wheat in the market. This modifying element of quantity call Q; and then any existing price in any particular corn-market will always be c+Q in the case where there is a deficiency; always c Q in the case where there is an excess; always c (i. e. a mononomial) in the case where there is neither deficiency nor excess, consequently where market price does not take place, but, on the contrary, the price which contradicts market price, or, in Adam Smith's language, natural price.

Thus it is shown, by pursuing the problem to the last, that every possible case of technical market value

(that is, not value in a market, but value in a market whose equilibrium has been disturbed) cannot by possibility rest upon a single law, (whether cost on the one hand, or relation of supply to demand on the other,) but of necessity upon two laws; briefly, that it must be a Binomial. It is scandalous and astonishing that Adam Smith, the introducer of this important distinction, should himself be the first, in very many cases, to confound it with its own formal antithesis. It is still more scandalous that Ricardo-actually making war upon the logic of Adam Smith, and founding his theory upon a much severer logic- should equally have confounded the law of market value with the direct contradiction to that law. Both did so under the misleading of a verbal equivocation 28 in the term "market;" and the possibility of this equivocation would be banished henceforth by substituting for "market value" the term Binomial value.

CHAPTER III.

WAGES.

THERE are four elements in the condition of every working body, which (like so many organs of a complex machine) must eternally operate by aiding or by thwarting each other. According to the social circumstances at the time given, these elements must act either in the same direction or in different directions; and conformably to the modes of combining the action under four

distinct causes, operating by different proportions, and often in conflicting directions, must be the practical result, -the tendencies upwards or downwards which will affect wages universally.

The four elements are these:

Is

1. The rate of movement in the POPULATION: that steadily advancing or slowly receding? Does that tend to raise the value of wages, or to depress it?

2. The rate of movement in the national CAPITAL: Is that advancing or receding? And does it pro tanto therefore tend to raise or to depress the rate of wages?

3. The fluctuations in the price of necessaries, but, above all, of FOOD: Are those fluctuations from one decennium to another tending, upon the whole, to an advance or to a decline? Is the price of food from century to century, when taken with its complementary adjunct in the price of clothes, fire, and lodging, such as, upon the whole, to sustain wages to stimulate wages -or to depress them?

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4. The traditional STANDARD OF LIVING: Is that fortunately high and exacting in its requisitions? or is "man's life," to cite a strong word from Shakespeare, (whose profound humanity had fixed his attention upon the vast importance of a high scale in domestic comfort,) —“ is man's life cheap as brutes'?" Is it in short an old English standard 29 which prevails, or a modern Irish standard? Is it that standard which elevated the noble yeomanry of England through six centuries, or that which has depressed to an abject animal existence the Irish serfs; and depressed the houseless lazzaroni of Naples, Peru, and Mexico to a sensual dependence upon sunshine and sleep? To these four elements some hasty thinkers would add a fifth, viz. the relative quantity of work to be done, and this certainly is important;

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for, undoubtedly, if the population should increase, it will be a balance to that increase if the national work increases by the same proportion; and it will be more than a balance if the national work should increase more

than proportionally. But the element of work to be done is already expressed implicitly in the first two elements of population and of capital; for, if the population increase, then the work of raising food must increase commensurately: and, again, if the capital increase, it will force some corresponding employment for itself by tentatively exploring every kind of new work that has any chance of proving profitable.

It is more important to notice, that all these four modifying causes of wages, though each separately for itself capable of several action, are also fitted to act in pairs, each two as a separate combination, Čevyos, or yoke of forces. Thus No. 1, or population, will act on wages at any rate; but it will act differently according as it is supported or thwarted by concurrent changes in capital. Population moving forward too rapidly would, cæteris paribus, be unfavorable to the prosperous movement of wages; yet if No. 2, the national capital, i. e. if the funds for employing labor, should advance even faster than the labor, then it might happen that wages would rise, although under a state of the population otherwise unfavorable to wages. This conditional action of one element according to the state of the other is continually exhibited, and often ruinously, in our infant colonies. Work of some kind, in such colonies, there must be; for there is a population of some class and quality to feed and to furnish with dwelling-houses, firing, and the very coarsest manufactures; as to the finer, these are long supplied by importation. But with this primary basis for going to work, sometimes there is labor in excess present with little capital for employing it; sometimes there

is capital in excess, with no adequate labor of a proper quality for receiving the action of capital. Very lately, and therefore after all the benefit of our long experience on such subjects, the government commissioners sent down to Paisley (with a view to the relief of that town from her surplus population) shipped off to distant settlements in strange climates mechanics and weavers, who were found more useless for colonial labors than a band of mere gentlemen; having none of the hardy habits which, more even than practised skill, are requisite for rural industry, and, in general, for industry of that elementary class required in young or infant communities. And universally it may be said, as a first consideration in the general theory of colonization, that not only capital and labor should be harmoniously combined, so that neither agency may languish from defect of the appropriate reagency, but also that labor itself, in its several subdivisions, should be more cautiously assorted than has generally been the case. Houses form an instantaneous class of necessaries in new colonies; those rare cases being excepted in which the season of the year and the climate allow of a long encampment. 80 Yet how can houses advance harmoniously (that is, in such a concurrency of the parts that one part may not be kept waiting for the other) unless the masons or bricklayers are in due proportion to the carpenters, both to the woodcutters and sawyers, — and all four classes to the plasterers, slaters, (or tilers,) and glaziers? Or, again, supposing the forest game to be scarce, but that a river, frith, or bay, near to the settlement, offers an unusual abundance of fine fish, how injurious must be that neglect which should defeat this bountiful provision of nature by leaving unsummoned a due proportion of fishermen, boats, nets, &c., and, in some cases, of a curing establishment, completely mounted. Five hundred men thus employed might support the whole colony,

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