Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/760

 work, but it appropriates the subsistence necessary from present and future production, taking it in the form of taxation. No part of the world really lives on past production—that is, out of the savings of past labor. The whole world really lives from hand to mouth. Let the entire production of any great city be stopped for a day, and it would become evident how entirely men are dependent upon present production. The worker, therefore, on any prolonged enterprise does not draw his subsistence from past labor. He simply draws from the present amount of wealth a certain part in one form after he has added to present wealth a certain amount in another form. "The series of exchanges which unite production and consumption may be likened," says Mr. George, "to a curved pipe filled with water. If a quantity of water is poured in at one end, a like quantity is released at the other. It is not identically the same water, but is its equivalent. And so they who do the work of production put in as they take out—they receive in subsistence and wages but the produce of their labor."

Capital, then, neither pays the wages of labor nor subsists laborers in production, yet it has a function in production. This function is, holds Mr. George, to assist labor by providing it with better tools; by enabling labor to avail itself of the reproductive force of nature, as to get corn by sowing it, etc.; by allowing the greater division of labor, and thus vastly increasing its efficiency; and by holding and distributing the results of labor through exchange. To make exchange perfect there must constantly be great stores of goods in warehouses, ships, and railroad trains—goods held to supply the market, and goods on their way to market. To make labor effective, there must be many and various tools, factories, engines—all sorts of machinery. These tools and these goods in the hands of the producer are capital. Capital may limit the form and productiveness of industry by not supplying these tools or not rendering it this service in exchange, but to do this i« a vastly different thing from limiting the exertion of labor, which is what the current doctrine teaches.

The wage-fund theory of the relations of capital and labor thus proves upon analysis to be untenable. The theory is and has always been weak. It has gained its ascendancy and almost universal acceptance, not from its own strength, Mr. George thinks, but from other considerations. Behind this theory stands another theory, that offers an explanation of continued poverty, and that fits into the other so as to lend it support in all directions. This theory is the Malthusian doctrine of population. This doctrine is, that population tends to increase faster than the means of obtaining food. Population presses with greater and greater force against the limit of subsistence. The limit is not a fixed but an elastic one, and the pressure exhibits itself in an increasing difficulty in procuring a living, and in that degree of want that will always keep population within the bounds of