Principles of western civilisation

410 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

The intellectual phenomena which developed side by side with these results in England were still more noteworthy. Slowly in English thought during the nineteenth century there came into view the economic theory, accepted as orthodox for the time being, of this “free” labour. According to the received opinion, the labouring classes were considered as condemned by natural law to live and breed under the control of capital on that minimum reward which—to quote Ricardo’s definition of the natural price of labour—was ‘“‘ necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist, and to perpetuate their race without either decrease or diminution.” The remarkable conception which accompanied this theory, and which runs through the whole of J. S. Mill’s Political Economy, delivered the labourer helplessly and permanently bound, as it were, into the hands of the capitalist class, making all efforts to free himself appear hopeless. This conception was presented in the now practically exploded theory of a wages’ fundimplicitly accepted, strange as it may appear, by the dominant school of English economists through all the period from 1820 to 18702—according to which the amount of the wages’ fund being considered as fixed by the prevailing conditions of capital, “any attempts which the working class might make to gain better terms from their employers by means of trade unions or otherwise, were either fore-

1 The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, by David Ricardo (1821), p. 86.

2 In an interesting review of the history of the theory of a “Wages? Fund,” Mr. Spooner brings out (Diet. of Pol. Econ., vol. iii. p. 638) a fact not always recognised, namely, that J. S. Mill before his death acknowledged (Fortnightly Review, May 1869) himself in error in the position he had previously taken up in this matter.