us
departments of manufactures, he found a general consensus of opinion
among employers and other men of practical experience making for a
similar conclusion. In France, Germany, and Belgium, where wages and
the standard of living were considerably lower than in England, the
cost of turning out a given product was not less, but greater. In the
United States and in a few trades of Holland, where the standard of
comfort was as high or higher than in the corresponding English
industries, more or better work was done. In short, the efficiency of
labour was found to vary with tolerable accuracy in accordance with
the standard of comfort or real wages.

In his introduction to his work on _Foreign Work and English Wages_,
Sir Thomas Brassey gives countenance to a theory of wages which has
frequently been attributed to him, and has sometimes been accepted as
a final statement of the relation of work and wages--viz., that "the
cost of work, as distinguished from the daily wage of the labourer,
was approximately the same in all countries." In other words, it is
held that, for a given class of work, there is a fixed and uniform
relation between wages and efficiency of labour for different lands
and different races.

Now, to the acceptance of this judgment, considered as a foundation of
a theory of comparative wages, there are certain obvious objections.
In the first place, in the statement of most of the cases which are
adduced to support the theory reference is made exclusively to money
wages, no account being taken of differences of purchasing power in
different countries. In order to establish any rational basis, the
relation must be between real wages or standard of living and
efficiency. Now, though it must be admitted as inherently probable
that some definite relation should subsist between wages and work, or,
in other words, between the standard of consumption and the standard
of production, it is not _a priori_ reasonable to expect this relation
should be uniform as between two such countries as England and India,
so that it should be a matter of economic indifference whether a piece
of work is done by cheap and relatively inefficient Indian labour or
by expensive and efficient English labour. Such a supposition could
only stand upon one of two assumptions.

The first assumption would be that of a direct arithmetical
progression in the relation of wage and work such as would require
every difference in quantity of food