ve increased with even
greater rapidity than the increase of population, and that if any class
obtains less than its due share, it is solely because of the greater
inequality of distribution. The denser the population, the more minute
becomes the subdivision of labour, the greater economies of production
and distribution, and hence, the very reverse of the Malthusian doctrine
is true.

_II.--The Law of Wages_

To discover the cause which, as population increases, and the productive
arts advance, deepens the poverty of the lowest class, we must find the
law which determines what part of the produce is distributed to labour
as wages, what part to capital as interest, and what part to landowners
as rent.

Rent is the price of monopoly arising from the reduction to individual
ownership of natural elements which human exertion can neither produce
nor increase. Interest is not properly a payment made for the use of
capital. It springs from the power of increase which the reproductive
forces of nature and the (in effect) analogous capacity for exchange
give to capital. The principle that men will seek to gratify their
desires with the least exertion operates to establish an equilibrium
between wages and interest.

This relation fixed, it is evident that interest cannot be increased
without increasing wages nor wages lowered without depressing interest.
The law of interest is that the relation between wages and interest is
determined by the average power of increase which attaches to capital
from its use in its reproductive modes. The law of wages is that they
depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labour
can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it
without the payment of rent. This law of wages accords with and explains
universal facts, and shows that where land is free, and labour is
unassisted by capital, the whole produce will go to labour as wages.
Where land is free, and labour is assisted by capital, wages will
consist of the whole produce, less that part necessary to induce the
storing up of labour as capital. Where land is subject to ownership and
rent arises, wages will be fixed by what labour can secure from the
highest natural opportunities open to it without the payment of rent.
Where natural opportunities are all monopolised, wages must be forced by
the competition among labourers to the minimum at which labourers will
consent to reproduce. Nothing can be cle