weller it is a matter of complete indifference how this purchase money which he pays is distributed, so long as the price is not raised. Whatever then be the flights of our fancy, we shall seek in vain for the labourers from whose just wages the jeweller's profit of £5000 could possibly have been withheld.
Perhaps, however, even after this illustration there may be some readers still unconvinced. Perhaps they may think it certainly a little strange that the labour of the five pearl stringers should be the source from which the jeweller can exploit so considerable a profit as £5000, but yet not quite inconceivable. Let me therefore bring forward another and still more striking illustration,—a good old example by which many an interest theory has already been tested and found false.
The owner of a vineyard has harvested a cask of good young wine. Immediately after the vintage it has an exchange value of £10. He lets the wine lie undisturbed in the cellar, and after a dozen years the wine, now of course an old wine, has an exchange value of £20. This is a well-known fact. The difference of £10 falls to the owner of the wine as interest on the capital contained in the wine. Now who are the labourers that are exploited by this profit of capital?
During the storage there has been no further labour expended on the wine. The only conceivable thing is that the exploitation has been at the expense of those labourers who produced the new wine. The owner of the vineyard has paid them too small a wage. But I ask, How much ought he "in justice" to have paid them as wage? Even if he pays them the entire £10, which was the value of the new wine at the time of harvest, there stills remains to him the increment in value of £10, which Rodbertus brands as profit of plunder. Indeed even if he pays them £12 or £15 as wages, the accusation of plundering will still hang over him; he will only be free from it if he has paid the full £20. Now can any one seriously ask that £20 should be paid as "just wages of labour" for a product that is not worth more than £10? Does the owner know beforehand whether the product will ever be worth £20? Is it not possible that he might be forced, contrary to his original intention, to use or to sell the wine before the expiry of twelve years? And would he not then have paid £20 for a product that was never worth more than £10 or perhaps £12? And then, how is he to pay the labourers who produce that other new wine which he sells at once for £10? Is he to pay them also £20? Then he will be ruined. Or only £10? Then different labourers will receive different wages for precisely similar work, which again is unjust; not to mention the fact that a man cannot very well know beforehand whose product it is that will be sold at once, and whose stored up for a dozen years.
But still further. Even a £20 wage for a cask of new wine would not be enough to protect the vine-grower from the accusation of robbery; for he might let the wine lie in the cellar twenty-four years instead of twelve, and then it would be worth not £20 but £40. Is he then, justly speaking, bound to pay the labourers who, twenty-four years before that, have produced the wine, £40 instead of £10? The idea is too absurd. But if he pays them only £10 or £20, then he makes a profit on capital, and Rodbertus declares that he has curtailed the labourer's just wage by keeping back a part of the value of his product!
I scarcely think any one will venture to maintain that the cases of interest which have been brought forward, and the numerous cases analogous to them, are explained by Rodbertus's theory. But a theory which has failed to explain any important part of the phenomena to be explained cannot be the true one, and so this final examination brings us to the same result as the detailed criticism which preceded it might lead us to expect. Rodbertus's Exploitation theory is, in its foundation and in its conclusions, wrong; it is in contradiction with itself and with the circumstances of actual life.
The nature of my critical task is such that, in the foregoing 