ere released from all the shackles of the much-abused wage-contract, and put in the most favourable position that can be conceived—that of undertaker in his own right. As labourer-undertaker he will certainly receive the whole of the £550, but not before they are produced; that is to say, not till the end of the five years. And how can that which the very nature of things denies to the undertaker himself be accomplished, in the name of the pure idea of justice, through the contract of wages?
To give the matter its proper expression, what the socialists would have is, that the labourers, by means of the wage-contract, should get more than they have made; more than they could get if they were undertakers on their own account; and more than they produce for the undertaker with whom they conclude the wage-contract. What they have created, and what they have just claim on, is the £550 at the end of the five years. But the £550 at the end of two and a half years which the socialists claim for them is more; if the interest stand at 5 per cent it is about as much as £620 at the end of five years. And this difference of value is not, as might be thought, a result of social institutions which have created interest and fixed it at 5 per cent—institutions that might be combated. It is a direct result of the fact that the life of all of us plays itself out in time; that to-day with its wants and cares comes before to-morrow; and that none of us is sure of the day after to-morrow. It is not only the capitalist greedy of profit, it is every labourer as well, nay, every human being that makes this distinction of value between present and future. How the labourer would cry out that he was defrauded if, instead of the 20s. which are due him for his week's wage to-day, one were to offer him 20s. a year hence! And that which is not a matter of indifference to the labourer is to be a matter of indifference to the undertaker! He is to give £550 at the end of two and a half years for the £550 which he is to receive, in the form of the completed product, only at the end of five years. That is neither just nor natural. What is just and natural is—I willingly acknowledge it again—that the labourer should receive the whole value, the £550, at the end of five years. If he cannot or will not wait five years, yet he should, all the same, have the value of his product; but of course the present value of his present product. This value, however, will require to be less than the corresponding proportion of the future value of the product of the technical labour, because in the economic world the law holds that the present value of future goods is less than that of present goods,—a law that owes its existence to no social or political institution, but directly to the nature of men and the nature of things.
If prolixity may ever be excused, it is in this instance, where we have to confute a doctrine with issues so extremely serious as the socialist Exploitation theory. Therefore at the risk of being wearisome to many of my readers I shall put a second concrete case, which, I hope, will afford me an opportunity of pointing out still more convincingly the blunders of the socialists.
In our first illustration we took no account of the division of labour. Let us now vary the hypothesis in such a way that at this point it will come nearer to the reality of economic life.
Suppose then that, in the making of the engine, five different workers take separate parts, each contributing one year's labour. One labourer obtains, say, by mining, the needful iron ore; the second smelts it; the third transforms the iron into steel; the fourth takes the steel and manufactures the separate constituent parts; and finally the fifth gives the parts their necessary connection, and in general puts the finishing touches to the work. As each succeeding labourer in this case, by the very nature of things, can only begin his work when his predecessors have finished theirs, the five years' work of our labourers cannot be performed simultaneously but only successively. Thus the making 