divided the whole product among themselves alone, in which case, as we have seen, the justice of the division would have been beyond question.
Labourer No. 5 receives, in the case of division, £100 immediately after the year's labour; in the case of the wage-contract he receives the same sum at the same time.
Labourer No. 4 receives, in the case of division, £105 a year after the termination of the year's labour; in the case of the wage-contract £100 immediately after the labour. If, in the latter case, he lets this sum lie at interest for a year he will be in exactly the same position as he would have been in the case of division; he will be in possession of £105 one year after the conclusion of his labour.
Worker No. 3 receives, in the case of division, £110 two years after the termination of his labour; in the wage-contract, £100 at once, which sum, placed at interest for two years, will increase to £110.
And in the same way, finally, the £100 which the first and second labourers receive are, with the addition of the respective interests, quite equivalent to the £120 and the £115 which, in the case of division, these two labourers would have received respectively four and three years after the conclusion of their labour.
But if each single wage under the contract is equal to the corresponding quota under the division, of course the sum of the wages must also be equal to the sum of the division quotas; the sum of £500 which the undertaker pays to the labourers immediately on the completion of their work is entirely equal in value to the £550 which, in the other case, would have been divided among the labourers at the end of the fifth year.
A higher wage payment, e.g. to pay the year's labour at £110 each labourer, is only conceivable in one of two cases; either if that which is not indifferent to the labourers, namely, the difference of time, were completely indifferent to the undertaker; or if the undertaker were willing to make a gift to the labourers of the difference in value between a present £110 and a future £110. Neither the one nor the other is to be expected of private undertakers, at least as a rule; nor do they deserve the slightest reproach on that account, and, least of all, the reproach of injustice, exploitation, or robbery.
There is only one personage from whom the labourers could expect such a treatment—the State. For on the one hand, the state, as a permanently existing entity, is not bound to pay as much regard to the difference of time in the outgoing and replacing of goods as the short-lived individual. And on the other hand, the state, whose end is the welfare of the whole, can, if it is a question of the welfare of a great number of the members, quit the strict standpoint of service and counter-service, and, instead of bargaining, may give. So then it certainly is conceivable that the state—but certainly only the state—assuming the function of a gigantic undertaker of production, might offer to the labourers as wage the full future value of their future product at once, that is, immediately after the accomplishment of their labour.
Whether the state ought to do this,—by which, in the view of Socialism, the social question would be practically solved,—is a question of propriety which I have no intention of entering on at this moment. But this must be repeated with all emphasis: if the socialist state pays down at once, as wages to the labourer, the whole future value of his product, it is not a fulfilment of the fundamental law that the labourer should receive the value of his product as wages, but a departure from it on social and political grounds. And such a proceeding would not be the bringing back of a state of things that was in itself natural, or in accordance with the pure idea of justice,—a state of things only temporarily disturbed by the exploiting greed of the capitalists. It would be an artificial interference, with the intention of making something possible which, in the natural course of things, was not possible, and of making it possible by means of a disguised continuous gift fro