Finally, he discovered that it is, in the last resort commerce that destroys the inborn beauties and harmonies of the capitalist mode of production. A step further, and he will, perhaps, discover that the one evil in capitalist production is capital itself. Only a man with such atrocious want of the critical faculty and such spurious erudition deserved, in spite of his Protectionist heresy, to become the secret source of the harmonious wisdom of a Bastiat and of all the other Free Trade optimists of to-day. We shall inquire in another place, what circumstances in relation to productivity may modify the law for individual branches of industry. For it is not the wages that is given to the labourer per day that constitutes the real price of labour, although it is its apparent price.
Labour estimated by the day, is much lower in Scotland than in England.
Labour by the piece is generally cheaper in England. On the contrary, lowness of wages produces, in its turn, dearness of labour. Labour being dearer in Ireland than it is in England because the wages are so much lower. Essay on the Rate of Wages with an Examination of the Causes of the Differences in the Conditions of the Labouring Population throughout the World.