ducts comes into correspondence with the increased capital now devoted to agriculture, and yields to it also no more than the common rate of profit? If the "law" that the amount of rent is not regulated by the outlay of capital, but only by the amount of labour expended, has not prevented equalisation in manufacture, how could it prevent it in raw production? But what in that case would become of the constant surplus over the usual rate of profit, the land-rent?
Or assume that an equalisation does not take place. In that case, there being no universal rate of profit, then in agriculture, as in everything else, there is no definite rule as to how much "rent" one may calculate as profit of capital. And, finally, there is no division line between capital and rent of land.
Therefore, in either case, whether an equalisation of profits does take place or does not, Rodbertus's theory of land-rent hangs in the air. There is contradiction upon contradiction, and that, moreover, not in trifles, but in the fundamental doctrines of the theory.
My criticism has hitherto been directed to the individual parts of Rodbertus's theory. I may conclude by putting the theory as a whole to the test. If correct, it must be competent to give a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon of interest as presented in actual economic life, and, moreover, of all the essential forms in which it presents itself. If it cannot do so, it is self-condemned; it is not correct.
I now maintain, and shall attempt to prove, that although Rodbertus's Exploitation theory might possibly account for the interest borne by that part of capital which is invested in wages, it is absolutely impossible for it to explain the interest on that part of capital which is invested in the materials of manufacture. Let the reader judge.
A jeweller, whose chief business it is to make strings of pearls, employs annually five labourers to make strings to the value of £100,000, and sells them on an average in a year's time. He will accordingly have a capital of £100,000 constantly invested in pearls, which, at the usual rate of interest, must yield him a clear annual profit of £5000. We now ask, How is it to be explained that he gets this income?
Rodbertus answers, Interest on capital is a profit of plunder, got by curtailing the natural and just wages of labour. Wages of what labour? Of the five labourers who sorted and strung the pearls? That cannot well be; for if, by curtailing the just wages of the five labourers, one could gain £5000, then the just wages of these labourers must, in any case, have amounted to more than £5000. That is to say, these wages must have amounted, in any case, to more than £1000 per man,—a height of just wages that can hardly be taken seriously, especially as the business of sorting and stringing pearls is very little above the character of unskilled labour.
But let us look a little farther. Perhaps it is the labourers of an earlier stage of production from the product of whose labour the jeweller obtains his stolen profit; say the pearl-fishers. But the jeweller has not come into contact at all with these labourers, for he buys his pearls direct from an undertaker of pearl-fishing, or from a middleman; he has therefore had no opportunity whatever of deducting from the pearl-fishers a part of their product, or a part of the value of their product. But perhaps the undertaker of pearl-fishing has done so instead of him, so that the jeweller's profit originates in a deduction which the undertaker of the pearl-fishing has made from the wages of his labourers. That, however, is impossible; for clearly the jeweller would make his profit even if the undertaker of the pearl-fishing had made no deduction whatever from the wages of his labourers. Even if this latter undertaker were to divide among his labourers as wages the whole £100,000 that the pearls so obtained are worth—the whole £100,000 he receives from the jeweller as purchase money—then it only comes to this, that he makes no profit. It in no wise follows that the jeweller loses his profit. For to the je