be the fair price of their labor. In the constant
struggle for wages which is going on between these two classes, their
strength is divided, and success alternates from one to the other. It
is even probable that in the end the interest of the working class must
prevail; for the high wages which they have already obtained make
them every day less dependent on their masters; and as they grow more
independent, they have greater facilities for obtaining a further
increase of wages.

I shall take for example that branch of productive industry which is
still at the present day the most generally followed in France, and in
almost all the countries of the world--I mean the cultivation of the
soil. In France most of those who labor for hire in agriculture, are
themselves owners of certain plots of ground, which just enable them
to subsist without working for anyone else. When these laborers come to
offer their services to a neighboring landowner or farmer, if he refuses
them a certain rate of wages, they retire to their own small property
and await another opportunity.

I think that, upon the whole, it may be asserted that a slow and gradual
rise of wages is one of the general laws of democratic communities. In
proportion as social conditions become more equal, wages rise; and as
wages are higher, social conditions become more equal. But a great and
gloomy exception occurs in our own time. I have shown in a preceding
chapter that aristocracy, expelled from political society, has
taken refuge in certain departments of productive industry, and has
established its sway there under another form; this powerfully affects
the rate of wages. As a large capital is required to embark in the great
manufacturing speculations to which I allude, the number of persons who
enter upon them is exceedingly limited: as their number is small, they
can easily concert together, and fix the rate of wages as they please.
Their workmen on the contrary are exceedingly numerous, and the number
of them is always increasing; for, from time to time, an extraordinary
run of business takes place, during which wages are inordinately high,
and they attract the surrounding population to the factories. But, when
once men have embraced that line of life, we have already seen that they
cannot quit it again, because they soon contract habits of body and mind
which unfit them for any other sort of toil. These men have generally
but little education and industry, with