of wages," and though the seaman may have performed his part, the disaster which prevents the ship from earning freight deprives him of claim for his wages.
In this legal maxim is embodied the truth for which I am contending. Production is always the mother of wages. Without production, wages would not and could not be. It is from the produce of labor, not from the advances of capital that wages come.
Wherever we analyze the facts this will be found to be true. For labor always precedes wages. This is as universally true of wages received by the laborer from an employer as it is of wages taken directly by the laborer who is his own employer. In the one class of cases, as in the other, reward is conditioned upon exertion. Paid sometimes by the day, oftener by the week or month, occasionally by the year, and in many branches of production by the piece, the payment of wages by an employer to an employee always implies the previous rendering of labor by the employee for the benefit of the employer, for the few cases in which advance payments are made for personal services are evidently referable either to charity or to guarantee and purchase. The name "retainer," given to advance payments to lawyers, shows the true character of the transaction, as does the name "blood money" given in 'longshore vernacular to a payment which is nominally wages advanced to sailors, but which in reality is purchase money — both English and American law considering a sailor as much a chattel as a pig.
I dwell on this obvious fact that labor always precedes wages, because it is all important to an understanding of the more complicated phenomena of wages that it should be kept in mind. And obvious as it is, as I have put it, the plausibility of the proposition that wages are drawn from capital — a proposition that is made the basis for such important and far-reaching deductions — comes in the first instance from a statement that ignores and leads the attention away from this truth. That statement is, that labor cannot exert its productive power unless supplied by capital
