quisites may be increased almost without limit.'

Ricardo takes the actual constitution of society for granted. The
threefold division into landowners, capitalists, and labourers is
assumed as ultimate. For him that is as much a final fact as to a
chemist it is a final fact that air and water are composed of certain
elements. Each class represents certain economic categories. The
landlord sits still and absorbs the overflow of wealth created by
others. The labourer acts a very important but in one respect a purely
passive part. His whole means of subsistence are provided by the
capitalist, and advanced to him in the shape of wages. His share in
the process is confined to multiplying up to a fixed standard. The
capitalist is the really active agent. The labourer is simply one of
the implements used in production. His wages are part of the
capitalist's 'costs of production.' The capitalist virtually raises
labourers, one may say, so long as raising them is profitable, just as
he raises horses for his farm. Ricardo, in fact, points out that in
some cases it may be for the farmer's interest to substitute horses
for men.[320] If it be essential to any product that there should be a
certain number of labourers or a certain number of horses, that number
will be produced. But when the expense becomes excessive, and in the
case of labourers that happens as worse soils have to be broken up for
food, the check is provided through its effect upon the accumulation
of capital. That, therefore, becomes the essential point. The whole
aim of the legislator should be to give facilities for the
accumulation of capital, and the way to do that is to abstain from all
interference with the free play of the industrial forces. The test,
for example, of the goodness of a tax--or rather of its comparative
freedom from the evils of every tax--is that it should permit of
accumulation by interfering as little as possible with the tendency
of the capital to distribute itself in the most efficient way.

III. VALUE AND LABOUR

To solve the distribution problem, then, it is necessary to get behind
the mere fluctuations of the market, and to consider what are the
ultimate forces by which the market is itself governed. What effect
has this upon the theory of the market itself? This leads to a famous
doctrine.

According to his disciple, M'Culloch, Ricardo's great merit was that
he 'laid down the fundamental theorem of the science of value.' He
thus