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 upon them, and the claim of the capitalist to a reward for their use is without foundation. The quality of labour is of no account, as all labour is equally necessary.

The "natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers one with another to subsist and to perpetuate their race without either increase or diminution." "The market price for labour is the price which is really paid for it. &hellip; However much the market price may deviate from its natural price it has, like commodities, a tendency to conform to it." It is pretty clear that Ricardo did not mean the absolute and indispensable minimum of necessaries of life when he referred to "subsisting," but spoke of the "comforts which custom renders absolute necessaries." That is, not mere subsistence level, but the customary standard of life was the basis on which the natural price of labour was to be calculated. But such qualifications could hardly hold their own against such language as, "It is only after their privations have reduced their number, or the demand for labour has increased, that the market price of labour will rise to its natural price."

The question naturally suggested itself, What proportion did the reward of labour bear to the value created by labour? This question was solved to the great satisfaction of Socialists by a reference to the statistics of Patrick Colquhoun. Colquhoun demonstrated, apparently on insufficient evidence, that the national income in 1812–13 was 430 millions. Of this the working classes, including the army, navy, and paupers, received somewhere about one quarter. Clearly, therefore, the labourer, so far from receiving the value his labour created, received only one quarter, the remainder being distributed amongst capitalists, landlords, and Government in the shape of profits, rents, and taxes. This statement of the case was improved upon by later writers who assumed that the proportion received by the labourer was decreasing. Hodgskin speaks of the labourer's having to make six loaves before he can eat one.

Here, then, was capitalistic economy convicted out of the mouth of its greatest champion, and a host of writers seized upon the damning evidence and hammered it at white heat into a terrific indictment of the greed and rapacity of capitalists, landlords, and "tax-eaters." Socialists, like James O'Brien,