he soil.

Nobody has ever calculated the _cost of production_ of a producer; and
if a noble loafer costs far more to society than a worker, it remains to
be seen whether a robust day-labourer does not cost more to society than
a skilled artisan, when we have taken into account infant-mortality
among the poor, the ravages of anaemia, and premature deaths.

Could they, for example, make us believe that the 1s. 3d. paid to a
Paris workwoman, the 3d. paid to an Auvergne peasant girl who grows
blind at lace-making, or the 1s. 8d. paid to the peasant represent their
"cost of production." We know full well that people work for less, but
we also know that they do so exclusively because, thanks to our
wonderful organization, they would die of hunger did they not accept
these mock wages.

For us the scale of remuneration is a complex result of taxes, of
governmental tutelage, of Capitalist monopoly. In a word, of State and
Capital. Therefore, we say that all wages' theories have been invented
after the event to justify injustices at present existing, and that we
need not take them into consideration.

Neither will they fail to tell us that the Collectivist scale of wages
would be an improvement. "It would be better," so they say, "to see
certain artisans receiving a wage two or three times higher than common
labourers, than to see a minister receiving in a day what a workman
cannot earn in a year. It would be a great step towards equality."

For us this step would be the reverse of progress. To make a distinction
between simple and professional work in a new society would result in
the Revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal fact
we submit to nowadays, but that we nevertheless find unjust. It would
mean imitating those gentlemen of the French Assembly who proclaimed on
August 4th, 1789, the abolition of feudal rights, but who on August 8th
sanctioned these same rights by imposing dues on the peasants to
compensate the noblemen, placing these dues under the protection of the
Revolution. It would mean imitating the Russian Government, which
proclaimed, at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, that certain
lands should henceforth belong to the nobility, while formerly these
lands were considered as belonging to the serfs.

Or else, to take a better known example, when the Commune of 1871
decided to pay members of the Commune Council 12s. 6d. a day, while the
Federates on the ramparts received only 1