refuse to maintain him altogether, or, which will evidently be more to his own interest, say to him, "I will maintain you, indeed, but you shall now work hard, instead of indolently, and instead of being allowed to lay by what you save, as you might have done, had you remained independent, I will take all the surplus. You would not lay it up for yourself; it is wholly your own fault that has thrown you into my power, and I will force you to work, or starve; yet you shall have no profit of your work, only your daily bread for it; [and competition shall determine how much of that[1]]." This mode of treatment has now become so universal that it is supposed to be the only natural—nay, the only possible one; and the market wages are calmly defined by economists as "the sum which will maintain the labourer."
137. The power of the provident person to do this is only checked by the correlative power of some neighbour of similarly frugal
- ↑ [I have no terms of English, and can find none in Greek nor Latin, nor in any other strong language known to me, contemptuous enough to attack the bestial idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be measured by competition.]
