e receives the entire steam-engine, or the whole value of £550. Let us calculate then for comparison's sake what would be the value of the part-wage anticipated as above at the end of the fifth year? The £100 which the labourer has received at the end of the first year can be put out at interest for the next four years—that is, till the end of the fifth year; at the rate of 5 per cent (without calculating compound interest), the £100 may therefore increase by £20—this course being open even to the wage-paid labourer. Thus, it is clear, the £100 paid at the end of the first year are equivalent to £120 at the end of the fifth. If the labourer then, for the fifth part of the technical labour, receives £100 at the end of a year, clearly he is paid according to a scale which puts him in as favourable a position as if he had received £550 for the whole labour at the expiry of five years.
But what do Rodbertus and the socialists suppose to be the application of the principle that the labourer should receive the whole value of his product? They would have the whole value that the completed engine will have at the end of the process of production applied to the payment of wages, but they would have this payment not made at the conclusion of the whole production, but spread proportionally over the whole course of the labour. We should consider well what that means. It means that the labourer in our example, through this averaging of the part payments, is to receive in two and a half years the whole of the £550 which will be the value of the completed steam-engine at the end of five years.
I must confess that I consider it absolutely impossible to base this claim on these premises. How should it be according to nature, and founded on the pure idea of justice, that any one should receive at the end of two and a half years a whole that he will only have produced in five years? It is so little "according to nature," that, on the contrary, in the nature of things it could not be done. It could not be done even if the labourer were 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 