of the engine will take five years just as in the first illustration. The value of the completed engine remains, as before, £550. According to the proposition that the labourer is to receive the entire value of his product, how much will each of the five partners be able to claim for what he has done?
Let us try to answer this question first on the assumption that the claims of wages are to be adjusted, without the intervention of an outside undertaker, solely among the labourers themselves; the product obtained is to be divided simply among the five labourers. In this case two things are certain.
First, a division can only take place after five years, because before that date there is nothing suitable for division. For if one were now to give away in payment of wages to individuals, say the brass and iron which had been secured during the first two years, the raw material for the next stage of the work would be wanting. It is abundantly clear that the product acquired in the first years is necessarily withdrawn from any earlier division, and must remain bound up in the production till the close.
Second, it is certain that a total value of £550 will have to be divided among the five labourers.
In what proportion will it be divided?
Certainly not, as one might easily think at the first hasty glance, into equal parts. For this would be distinctly to favour those labourers whose labour comes at a later stage of the total production, in comparison with their colleagues who were employed in the earlier stages. The labourer who completed the engine would receive for his year's labour £110 immediately on the conclusion of his work; the labourer who turned out the separate constituent portions of the engine would receive the same sum, but must wait on his payment for a whole year after the completion of his year's labour; while that labourer who procured the ore would not receive the same amount of wages till four years after he had done his share of the work. As such a delay could not possibly be indifferent to the partners, every one would wish to undertake the final labour (which has not to suffer any postponement of wage), and nobody would be willing to take the preparatory stages. To find labourers to take the preparatory stages then, the labourers of the final stages would be compelled to grant to their colleagues who prepared the work a larger share in the final value of the product, as compensation for the postponement The amount of this larger share would be regulated, partly by the period of the postponement, partly by the amount of difference that subsists between the valuation of present and the valuation of future goods,—a difference which would depend on the economic circumstances of our little society, and on its level of culture. If this difference, for instance, amounted to 5 per cent per annum, the shares of the five labourers would graduate in the following manner:—
That all the labourers should receive the same amount of £110 is only conceivable on the assumption that the difference of time is of no importance whatever to them, and that they find themselves quite as well paid with the £110, which they receive three or four years after, as if they had received the £110 immediately on the conclusion of their labour. But I need scarcely emphasise that such an assumption never corresponds with fact, and never can. That they should each receive £110 immediately on the accomplishment of their labour is, if a third party do not step in, altogether impossible.
It is well worth the trouble, in passing, to draw particular attention to one circumstance. I believe no one will find the above scheme of distribution unjust. Above all, as the labourers divide their own product among themselves alone, there cannot be any question of injustice on the part of a capitalist-undertaker. And yet that labourer who has performed the second last fifth part of the work does not receive the full fifth part of the final value of the product, but only £105; and the last labourer of all receives only £100.
Now assume, as is generally the c