re not competing among themselves and have no occasion to
content themselves with less; not more, because the capitalists, in the
absence of competition among themselves, have no occasion to attract
working-men by extraordinary favours. This standard of the average needs
and the average civilisation of the workers has become very complicated
by reason of the complications of English industry, and is different for
different sorts of workers, as has been pointed out. Most industrial
occupations demand a certain skill and regularity, and for these
qualities which involve a certain grade of civilisation, the rate of
wages must be such as to induce the worker to acquire such skill and
subject himself to such regularity. Hence it is that the average wages
of industrial workers are higher than those of mere porters, day
labourers, etc., higher especially than those of agricultural labourers,
a fact to which the additional cost of the necessities of life in cities
contributes somewhat. In other words, the worker is, in law and in fact,
the slave of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he
is sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity.
If the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it
falls, their price falls. If it falls so greatly that a number of them
become unsaleable, if they are left in stock, they are simply left idle;
and as they cannot live upon that, they die of starvation. For, to speak
in the words of the economists, the expense incurred in maintaining them
would not be reproduced, would be money thrown away, and to this end no
man advances capital; and, so far, Malthus was perfectly right in his
theory of population. The only difference as compared with the old,
outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of to-day seems to be free
because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week,
the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced
to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular
person, but of the whole property-holding class. For him the matter is
unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives
him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the
disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of
being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left
to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to hav