e entire future value of his product, and they speak as if this were quite self-evident, and indeed the only possible explanation of the proposition.
Let us illustrate the matter by a concrete example. Suppose that the production of a steam-engine costs five years of labour, and that the price which the completed engine fetches is £550. Suppose further, putting aside meanwhile the fact that such work would actually be divided among several persons, that a worker by his own continuous labour during five years makes the engine. We ask, What is due to him as wages in the light of the principle that to the labourer should belong his entire product, or the entire value of his product? There cannot be a moment's doubt about the answer. The whole steam-engine belongs to him, or the whole of its price, £550. But at what time is this due to him? There cannot be the slightest doubt about that either. Clearly it is due on the expiry of five years. For of course he cannot get the steam-engine before it exists; he cannot take possession of a value of £550 created by himself before it is created. He will, in this case, have to get his compensation according to the formula, The whole future product, or its whole future value, at a future period of time.
But it very often happens that the labourer cannot or will not wait till his product be fully completed. Our labourer, for instance, at the expiry of a year, wishes to receive a part payment corresponding to the time he has worked. The question is, How is this to be measured in accordance with the above proposition? I do not think there can be a moment's doubt about the answer. The labourer has got his due if he now receives the whole of what he has made up till now. Thus, for example, if up till now he has produced a heap of brass, iron, or steel, in the raw state, then he will receive his due if he is handed over just this entire heap of brass, iron, or steel, or the entire value which this heap of materials has, and of course the value which it has now. I do not think that any socialist whatever could have anything to object to in this conclusion.
Now, how great will this value be in proportion to the value of the completed steam-engine? This is a point on which a superficial thinker may easily make a mistake. The point is, the labourer has up till now performed a fifth part of the technical work which the production of the whole engine requires. Consequently, on a superficial glance, one is tempted to infer that his present product will possess a fifth part of the value of the whole product—that is, a value of £110. On this view the labourer ought to receive a year's wage of £110.
This, however, is incorrect. £110 are a fifth part of the value of a steam-engine when completed. But what the labourer has produced up till now is not a fifth part of an engine that is already completed, but only a fifth part of an engine that will not be completed till four years more have elapsed. And these are two different things; not different in virtue of a sophistical quibble, but different in very fact. The one-fifth part has a different value from the other so surely as, in the valuation of to-day, an entire and finished engine has a different value from an engine that will only be ready for use in four years; so surely as, generally speaking, present goods have a different value in the present from future goods.
That present goods, in the estimation of the present time, in which our economical transactions take place, have a higher value than future goods of the same kind and quality, is one of the most widely known and most important economic facts. In the second volume of this work I shall have to make thorough examination into the causes to which this fact owes its origin, into the many and various ways in which it shows itself, and into the no less many and various consequences to which it leads in economic life; and that examination will be neither so easy nor so simple as the simplicity of the fundamental thought seems to promise. But in the meantime I think I may be allowed to appeal to t