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 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 part