Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ... estimation of its price as determined by the Bank of England, or the government of the da}'. No real amelioration of the position of the working classes can be effected until this is done. (j. Wages.--On the question of wages political economists are also very much at sea. If the doctrines of Adam Smith had been followed as religiously as so many economists are always assuring us they have been, the social question would never have been raised at all. "The produce of labour," he declares, "constitutes the natural recompense of labour."1 Nevertheless most economists admit that he does not get anything like the produce of his labour, and is thus, according to Smith, robbed of it. 51 ill in his "Political Economy" sets forth the famous wages-fund theory,2 but he afterwards renounced it, and I do not find what theory he adopted. Cairnes and Fawcett, are, I think, the only subsequent economists who gave support to it, although I have elsewhere shown that Mr. Spencer still believes in it. Ricardo is the author of the celebrated "iron law." It is to the effect that, " the natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourer to subsist;"3 and it cannot rise above this, because if it does the labourers are encouraged to marry and increase their number, by which means it is brought down again even below subsistence wage, until the consequent starvation and disease thins them out again, when another rise takes place, and so the infernal round goes on. It was this brutal doctrine that started the brilliant Lasalle on the crusade on which he converted Bismarck, and was followed by the whole body of German workmen. Germany lost in him, at the early age of 39, one of the most brilliant of her many brilliant sons. 1 "Inquiry, ..".
