Again, if we turn to Wages, we shall find a number of considerations which have illegitimately held the orthodox economists fast to their doctrine that they too, like Profits and Interest, tend naturally (except for special reasons and under special circumstances) to equality. But on examination it will be seen that Wages are the subjects of an enforced and artificial equality, and if left to themselves would like all else in this world which is the subject of differentiation and evolution, steadily tend to inequality. To begin with, we find the orthodox economists attaching an absurdly exaggerated importance to Ricardo's 'iron law of wages' as it is called, whereby through the combined operation of competition and the pressure of increasing population, wages are believed to be steadily pressed downwards by natural economic laws to a bare subsistence level, and so far to an equality. But now that Trades-Unionism has replaced this unlimited competition by combinations over a large portion of the industrial field, and Malthus' law of Population has turned out to be a superficial ingenious Nature myth in which half of the ultimate factors are left out of consideration, this particular conclusion of Ricardo's has lost its logical basis and justification; and accordingly we may dismiss his doctrine without further discussion, and indeed without apology, inasmuch as the actual tendency of wages since his time has belied his doctrine.

As for the other considerations which have misled the orthodox economists into the belief that Wages in the large tend to equality, they may be mainly reduced to the effects of the incidence of extraneous Power or pressure in one or other of its forms, and not to any law proper to the science of Political Economy as such. In the ages of Slavery, this pressure, whereby the remuneration of the slaves was reduced to an absolute equality, took the form of force open and undisguised; in ages of Serfdom, the power was somewhat modified and softened by Custom which had the force of law; in the Guild-system of the Middle Ages, the power concealed itself in legal enactments, as in a velvet glove; but in all these stages alike, the equality of wages was an enforced equality. In Modern Industry, Wages whether tending to equality or to inequality, have done so mainly as following; on the lines of custom and tradition, slowly modified in their course by evolution, and not by any merely economic law; for example, in most countries, power, and its handmaid custom, still decree that the wages of men and women shall be unequal for equal output in the same class of work; while the scale of real wages in country districts is everywhere somewhat lower than for an equal grade of work in the towns.

Between different countries, again, the wage-levels rise in a series of terraces of inequality, even when the products of their respective labour in the same lines of work compete on even terms in the world markets; - the standard rate in each instance following the lines of custom, tradition, and evolution, but not of economic law. Wages on the Continent, for example, are on a lower general level throughout than in England, and in England than in America; while in the East they are much lower than in Europe and the West. And if we take a particular country, say England, and ask why wages in the same lines of work, - as of engineering, cotton-spinning, weaving, bricklaying, carpentry, printing, etc., - are the same for each of the individual workers in a particular line, we shall find that it is due not to any strictly economic law or tendency as such, but either to policy, strategy, and expediency, or to - the pressure of extraneous power. The equality of wages to which all the different workmen in the same trade are squeezed and pressed, whatever be their relative efficiency, is a matter of expediency on the part both of the masters and the men, but operating for different reasons.

The masters favour it, because by fixing the wage-rate of all the workers at the level of the poorest of them, they are enabled to get an unpaid-for advantage out of the superior industry and efficiency of the remainder; the workmen favour it, in order to prevent that jealousy between them which, if the wages of each were separately graded according to his ability, would oppose a serious obstacle to their combination, and so would make the Trades-Unionism on which alone they can rely for the improvement of their condition, more difficult of realization. And lastly, when all else has been allowed for, the mere fact that the instruments of production are entirely in the hands of the masters, and that the workmen are reduced, in consequence, to the attitude of suppliants who must get work for themselves on any terms or starve, is enough of itself, in the absence of Trades-Unionism, to coerce the labourers to an equality of impotence through the unrestricted competition for work on the one hand, and the pressure of power on the other.

It is this divorcing of the workmen from the instruments of production by which alone they can live, that makes combination so easy and informal among the masters, but so difficult on the part of the men, and which in every pitched battle must give the victory to the masters. There must always be an inequality of bargaining power between masters and men in every contract, until that day shall arrive when the sacrifices of each master in a strike or lock-out will affect his present comfort and future destiny as seriously, in its way, as it does that of each of his workmen. For in all combinations of men whatever, and for whatever purpose, there is always generated a surplus of effective power over and above the sum-total of that of each individual when functioning as a separate unit. And as it is a universal law of Civilization that only suppliants, like rival lovers for the same hand, compete with each other, while those who have the power will always combine to keep it, the result is that the workmen stripped of their instruments of production by the capitalists, have no resource but, like disarmed soldiers, to sue for the favours of their masters and to compete against each other for them; and so, like all helpless passive things, must when shaken down as in a sieve, tend to a common dead level of equality; while the masters can take for themselves a greater share of the produce than would naturally fall to them (except in the case of the inventors) from the operation of mere economic laws alone.