"natural" rate of pay for labor
to-day is higher than it was fifty years ago and lower than it will
naturally be fifty years hence. Removing all disturbing influences and
letting society settle to-day into a perfectly static condition would
reveal the theoretical standard of present wages. Doing the same thing
after a lapse of fifty years would show what would then be the natural
or standard rate; and this would be higher than the present one. Not
only would the actual pay of labor have risen, but the standard to
which it tends to conform would have become higher after every
interval. The actual rate of wages at any one time varies from the
standard; but as both rise from decade to decade, the actual rate
hovers all the while within a certain distance of the standard one.

_Effects on Values._--In the same way the values of goods measured in
labor will in general be declining values. At no one time will actual
market prices accurately express the amounts of marginal labor that
are required for producing different articles, but they will
approximately express this. Articles will sell in the market for about
enough to pay for the labor that, when used as marginal labor,
suffices to produce them; and as this amount of labor put into a given
article grows less and less, the prices of the goods will actually pay
for fewer and fewer days' labor.

The standard price of anything will be the amount of money that is
needed to pay for the labor of making it, provided always that we are
careful to use only empty-handed labor in applying the test and that
we put that labor in the marginal position, as described in Chapters
IV and V, and so disentangle the product that is attributable to it
from that which is imputable to capital. If wages, as paid in money,
remain stationary, normal prices will decline and actual prices will
hover about them in their downward course, so that goods will actually
buy smaller and smaller amounts of labor, or, what is the same thing,
labor will secure as its pay more and more goods.[2]

[2] In measuring the cost of goods in labor, in Chapters IV
and V, we disentangled from the amount of goods which is the
joint product of labor and capital, the part which is
attributable to labor only. The mode of doing this is there
more fully stated. The old and crude method of using a labor
standard of value--which assumes that the product of a unit
of labor _aided by capital_ will alwa