Page:The complete works of Henry George vol. 1.djvu/74

 main on the islands, gathering the eggs and bringing them to a landing, whence, at intervals of a few days, they are taken in a small vessel to San Francisco and sold. When the season is over the men return and are paid their stipulated wages in coin. Does not this transaction amount to the same thing as if, instead of being paid in coin, the stipulated wages were paid in an equivalent of the eggs gathered? Does not the coin represent the eggs, by the sale of which it was obtained, and are not these wages as much the product of the labor for which they are paid as the eggs would be in the possession of a man who gathered them for himself without the intervention of any employer?

To take another example, which shows by reversion the identity of wages in money with wages in kind. In San Buenaventura lives a man who makes an excellent living by shooting for their oil and skins the common hair seals which frequent the islands forming the Santa Barbara Channel. When on these sealing expeditions he takes two or three Chinamen along to help him, whom at first he paid wholly in coin. But it seems that the Chinese highly value some of the organs of the seal, which they dry and pulverize for medicine, as well as the long hairs in the whiskers of the male seal, which, when over a certain length, they greatly esteem for some purpose that to outside barbarians is not very clear. And this man soon found that the Chinamen were very willing to take instead of money these parts of the seals killed, so that now, in large part, he thus pays them their wages.

Now, is not what may be seen in all these cases—the identity of wages in money with wages in kind—true of all cases in which wages are paid for productive labor? Is not the fund created by the labor really the fund from which the wages are paid?

It may, perhaps, be said: "There is this difference—