e" of
the engineer will have cost more to society than the "labour-force" of
the navvy. In fact--have not economists tried to prove to us that if an
engineer is paid twenty times more than a navvy it is _because_ the
"necessary" outlay to make an engineer is greater than that necessary to
make a navvy? And has not Marx asserted that the same distinction is
equally logical between two branches of manual labour? He could not
conclude otherwise, having taken up on his own account Ricardo's theory
of value, and upheld that goods _are_ exchanged in proportion to the
quantity of work socially necessary for their production.

But we know what to think of this. We know that if engineers,
scientists, or doctors are paid ten or a hundred times more than a
labourer, and if a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural
labourer, and ten times more than a girl in a match factory, it is not
by reason of their "cost of production," but by reason of a monopoly of
education, or a monopoly of industry. Engineers, scientists, and doctors
merely exploit their capital--their diplomas--as middle-class employers
exploit a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of
nobility.

As to the employer who pays an engineer twenty times more than a
labourer, it is simply due to personal interest; if the engineer can
economize L4,000 a year on the cost of production, the employer pays him
L800. And if the employer has a foreman who saves L400 on the work by
cleverly sweating workmen, he gladly gives him L80 or L120 a year. He
parts with an extra L40 when he expects to gain L400 by it; and this is
the essence of the Capitalist system. The same differences obtain among
different manual trades.

Let them, therefore, not talk to us of "the cost of production" which
raises the cost of skilled labour, and tell us that a student who has
gaily spent his youth in a university has a _right_ to a wage ten times
greater than the son of a miner who has grown pale in a mine since the
age of eleven; or that a weaver has a _right_ to a wage three or four
times greater than that of an agricultural labourer. The cost of
teaching a weaver his work is not four times greater than the cost of
teaching a peasant his. The weaver simply benefits by the advantages his
industry reaps in international trade, from countries that have as yet
no industries, and in consequence of the privileges accorded by all
States to industries in preference to the tilling of t