The Graduated Scale of the City of Paris.

If we glance at certain figures which show our economic progress, we see that the “iron law” has never ceased to leave an ever-increasing margin between the needs and the resources of the labourer.

In England, the figures of imports and exports combined, which from 1855 to 1859 stood at 275 francs per head, had increased from 1885 to 1887 to 435 francs, thus rising more than 54 per cent. In France, the consumption of meat, which in 1812 was 17·16 kilog. per head, had reached to 33 kilog. in 1882. The consumption of cotton per inhabitant was 1·80 kilog. in 1849, and 1·31 kilog. during the period from 1889–1891. Wool had passed in the same time from 4·624 kilog. to 5·509 kilog.

These are not signs of misery and decay such as are announced so clamorously by the seers of Socialism. When we compare the present mode of living among workmen, with that of only thirty years ago, their clothes, shoes, the women’s dresses, even down to the very appointments of the table, there is no honest person who will not recognise and admit the progress that has been made. In short, the working man gratuitously enjoys all the fruits of progress, and he can, for a few halfpence, by entering a railway train, give himself the luxury of a journey at speed, to which Napoleon at the height of his power could not attain. Machinery works for him. Whilst he watches it, it supplies a want which would have required the labour of twenty men. Instead of himself labouring, he simply directs it. The muscles which were formerly his instruments of labour, are now only the supports of his intellectual activity.

So far from facts having confirmed Lassalle’s imagined law, it is the law that Bastiat formulated in the following manner, which has been distinctly confirmed:—

“In proportion as their capital grows, does the actual capitalists’ share in the total product increase, whilst their relative share diminishes. The workmen on the contrary see their share increase in both senses.”

Mr. Atkinson, in a book based on some monographs on implements, in the United States, and published in 1884, has demonstrated the truth of this law. In a very striking diagram he points out that the tendency of wages is towards a maximum, and the tendency of profits towards a minimum. There have, no doubt, been fluctuations, the results of crises. A tendency towards a fall in money wages showed itself from 1883–1885; but if workmen lost thus, the purchasing power of their salaries having been increased by the general fall in prices, they were in reality better off than they had ever been before.

In a word we may conclude:

Man is a fixed capital, obeying the law of the relative value of fixed capital and circulating capital. The value of man is in proportion to the power of his tools. His value increases in proportion to the amount of circulating capital and to the power of fixed capital.

The price of labour is in direct proportion to the abundance and cheapness of circulating capital, the value, power, and total income from fixed capital, and in inverse ratio to the rate of income.