and who give property in
pledge, so that there may be no doubt about the matter. It seems
probable that the true average rate of interest in England is at present
about four per cent., but it varies in different countries, being lower
in England and Holland than anywhere else. In the United States it is
probably six or seven per cent.

The most important fact about #interest# is that #it is the same in one
business as in another#. The rates of profit differ very much, it is
true, but this is because the labour of superintendence is different, or
because there is greater risk in one trade than another. But the true
interest is the same, because capital, being lent in the form of money,
can be lent to one trade just as easily as to another. There is nothing
in circulating capital which fits it for one trade more than another:
accordingly it will be lent to that trade which offers ever so little
more interest than other trades. Thus #there is a constant tendency to
the equality of interest in all branches of industry#.

CHAPTER VII.

WAGES.

#43. Money Wages and Real Wages.# Wages, as we have already learnt, are
the payments received by a labourer in return for his labour. It does
not matter whether these payments are received daily, weekly, monthly,
quarterly, or yearly. A day gardener is, perhaps, paid every evening; an
artisan is usually paid on Saturday or Friday night, or sometimes
fortnightly; clerks receive their salaries monthly; managers, officers,
secretaries, and others, are paid quarterly, or sometimes half-yearly.
When the wages are paid monthly, or at longer intervals, they are
generally called #salary# (Latin, _salarium_, money given to Roman
soldiers for salt); but if the salary is paid for labour and nothing
else, it is exactly the same in nature as wages.

I said, in the last chapter, that wages consist of a share of the
produce of labour, land, and capital; in the preceding paragraph, I have
been saying that it consists of payments. Here arises one of the great
difficulties of our subject. As a matter of fact, the wages received by
labourers, in the present day, consist almost always of money. A person
working in a cotton mill produces cotton yarn; but he does not receive
at the end of the week so much cotton yarn; he receives so many
shillings. This is much more convenient; for if the labourer received
cotton yarn, or any other commodity which he produces, he would have to
go and sell it i