nglishman who is still
somewhat civilised, needs more than the Irishman who goes in rags, eats
potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty. But that does not hinder the
Irishman's competing with the Englishman, and gradually forcing the rate
of wages, and with it the Englishman's level of civilisation, down to the
Irishman's level. Certain kinds of work require a certain grade of
civilisation, and to these belong almost all forms of industrial
occupation; hence the interest of the bourgeoisie requires in this case
that wages should be high enough to enable the workman to keep himself
upon the required plane.

The newly immigrated Irishman, encamped in the first stable that offers,
or turned out in the street after a week because he spends everything
upon drink and cannot pay rent, would be a poor mill-hand. The mill-hand
must, therefore, have wages enough to enable him to bring up his children
to regular work; but no more, lest he should be able to get on without
the wages of his children, and so make something else of them than mere
working-men. Here, too, the limit, the minimum wage, is relative. When
every member of the family works, the individual worker can get on with
proportionately less, and the bourgeoisie has made the most of the
opportunity of employing and making profitable the labour of women and
children afforded by machine-work. Of course it is not in every family
that every member can be set to work, and those in which the case is
otherwise would be in a bad way if obliged to exist upon the minimum wage
possible to a wholly employed family. Hence the usual wages form an
average according to which a fully employed family gets on pretty well,
and one which embraces few members able to work, pretty badly. But in
the worst case, every working-man prefers surrendering the trifling
luxury to which he was accustomed to not living at all; prefers a pig-pen
to no roof, wears rags in preference to going naked, confines himself to
a potato diet in preference to starvation. He contents himself with half-
pay and the hope of better times rather than be driven into the street to
perish before the eyes of the world, as so many have done who had no work
whatever. This trifle, therefore, this something more than nothing, is
the minimum of wages. And if there are more workers at hand than the
bourgeoisie thinks well to employ--if at the end of the battle of
competition there yet remain workers who find nothing to do, they