Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/113

 form the measure of the patentee's charge; that is, to secure employment, he has only to charge a little less than the wages of the labor which the machine supplants. But when the patent expires, other machines of the same nature are brought into competition; and then his charge must be regulated on the same principle as every other, according to the abundance of machines The profit of capital employed in foreign trade, though it arises from supplanting labor, comes to be regulated, not by the value of the labor it supplants, but, as in all other cases, by the competition among the proprietors of capital, and it will be great or small in proportion to the quantity of capital that presents itself for performing the duty, and the demand for it." ("An Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth.")

Finally, then, in proportion as the profit may be greater than in other industries, fresh capital will be thrown into the new industry until the average profits in it have fallen to the common level.

We have just seen that the illustration of the railway was scarcely appropriate for throwing any light on the fiction of personified society. Nevertheless, M. Proudhon hardily continues his discourse: "These points cleared, nothing is more easy than to explain how labor must leave to each producer a surplus."

This which now follows belongs to classic antiquity. It is a poetic romance told in order to relieve the reader from the fatigue he has suffered from the rigor of the mathematical demonstrations which have preceded it. M. Proudhon gives to his personified society the name of Prometheus, whose noble traits he glorifies in these terms:

"At first, Prometheus, springing from the bosom of nature, awakes to life in an inertia full of charms, &c.,