THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 181
ing a constant rise of rent, as M. Proudhon says, are, on the contrary, so many temporary obstacles which oppose its rise.
The English landowners of the seventeenth century were so sensible ‘of this truth that they strenuously opposed all agricultural progress, for fear of seeing their revenues diminish. (See Petty, an English economist of the time of Charles II.)
Section V.—STRIKES AND THE COMBINATION OF WorkKMEN.
“Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than that of a rise in wheat, in wine, &c., that is to say, the effect produced by a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of wheat, &c., the integral price of everything. Let us go further still, wages are the proportion of the elements which compose wealth and which are consumed reproductively each day by the mass of the workers. But, to double wages . . - is to bestow upon each of the producers a part greater than his product, which is contradictory; and if the rise only affects a small number of industries, the result is to provoke a general perturbation in exchanges, in a word, a scarcity : . . - It is impossible, I insist, for the strikes which result in an increase in wages not to lead to a general dearness: that is as certain as that two and two make four.” (Proudhon, Vol. I., pp. 110 and III.)
We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four.
In the first place there is no such thing as general dearness. If the price of everything is doubled at the
