workman. You cannot tax the man who receives wages without increasing the price of his subsistence, since he has to add to his old expenditure that involved by the tax. You thus increase the fundamental price of labour. But although the fundamental price be not the immediate principle of the current value,[1] it is nevertheless a minimum below which it cannot fall. For if a merchant loses by his trade, he ceases to sell or manufacture; if a workman cannot live by his labour, he becomes a mendicant or leaves the country. That is not all: it is necessary that the workman obtain a certain profit,[2] to provide for accidents, to bring up his family. In a nation where trade and industry are free and vigorous, competition fixes this profit at the lowest possible rate.[3] A kind of equilibrium establishes itself between the value of all the productions of the land, the consumption of the different kinds of commodities, the different sorts of works, the number of men employed at them, and the price of their wages.
Wages can be fixed and remain constantly at a definite point only in virtue of this equilibrium, and of the influence which all the parts of the society, all the branches of production and commerce, exercise upon one another. This granted, if you change one of the weights, a movement cannot but result from it in the whole of the machine which tends to restore the old equilibrium. The proportion which the current value of wages bears to their fundamental value was established by the laws of this equilibrium and by the
