AN ECONOMICAL PROBLEM DISCUSSED FROM A
PHYSIOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW
[1890.]
THE first act of a new-born child is to draw a deep breath. In fact, it
will never draw a deeper, inasmuch as the passages and chambers of the
lungs, once distended with air, do not empty themselves again; it is
only a fraction of their contents which passes in and out with the
flow and the ebb of the respiratory tide. Mechanically, this act of
drawing breath, or inspiration, is of the same nature as that by which
the handles of a bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows
with air; and, in like manner, it involves that expenditure of energy
which we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere
metaphor to say that man is destined to a life of toil: the work of
respiration which began with his first breath ends only with his last;
nor does one born in the purple get off with a lighter task than the
child who first sees light under a hedge.
[148] How is it that the new-born infant is enabled to perform this
first instalment of the sentence of life-long labour which no man may
escape? Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular
question, it is a complicated piece of mechanism, built up out of
materials supplied by its mother; and in the course of such
building-up, provided with a set of motors--the muscles. Each of these
muscles contains a stock of substance capable of yielding energy under
certain conditions, one of which is a change of state in the nerve
fibres connected with it. The powder in a loaded gun is such another
stock of substance capable of yielding energy in consequence of a
change of state in the mechanism of the lock, which intervenes between
the finger of the man who pulls the trigger and the cartridge. If that
change is brought about, the potential energy of the powder passes
suddenly into actual energy, and does the work of propelling the
bullet. The powder, therefore, may be appropriately called work-stuff,
not only because it is stuff which is easily made to yield work in the
physical sense, but because a good deal of work in the economical sense
has contributed to its production. Labour was necessary to collect,
transport, and purify the raw sulphur and saltpetre; to cut wood and
convert it into powdered charcoal; to mix these ingredients in the
right proportions; to give the mixture the proper grain, and so on.
The powder [149] once formed part of the stock, or capital, of a
powder-maker: and it is not only certain natural bodies which are
collected and stored in the gunpowder, but the labour bestowed on the
operations mentioned may be figuratively said to be incorporated in
it.
In principle, the work-stuff stored in the muscles of the new-born
child is comparable to that stored in the gun-barrel. The infant is
launched into altogether new surroundings; and these operate through
the mechanism of the nervous machinery, with the result that the
potential energy of some of the work-stuff in the muscles which bring
about inspiration is suddenly converted into actual energy; and this,
operating through the mechanism of the respiratory apparatus, gives
rise to an act of inspiration. As the bullet is propelled by the
"going off" of the powder, as it might be said that the ribs are
raised and the midriff depressed by the "going off" of certain
portions of muscular work-stuff. This work-stuff is part of a stock or
capital of that commodity stored up in the child's organism before
birth, at the expense of the mother; and the mother has made good her
expenditure by drawing upon the capital of food-stuffs which furnished
her daily maintenance.
Under these circumstances, it does not appear to me to be open to doubt
that the primary act of outward labour in the series which necessarily
accompany [150] the life of man is dependent upon the pre-existence of
a stock of material which is not only of use to him, but which is
disposed in such a manner as to be utilisable with facility. And I
further imagine that the propriety of the application of the term
'capital' to this stock of useful substance cannot be justly called in
question; inasmuch as it is easy to prove that the essential
constituents of the work-stuff accumulated in the child's muscles have
merely been transferred from the store of food-stuffs, which everybody
admits to be capital, by means of the maternal organism to that of the
child, in which they are again deposited to await use. Every
subsequent act of labour, in like manner, involves an equivalent
consumption of the child's store of work-stuff--its vital capital; and
one of the main objects of the process of breathing is to get rid of
some of the effects of that consumption. It follows, then, that, even
if no other than the respiratory work were going on in the organism,
the capital of work-stuff, which the child brought with it into the
world, must sooner or later be used up, and the movements of breathing
must come to an end; just as the see-saw of the piston of a
steam-engine stops when the coal in the fireplace has burnt away.
Milk, however, is a stock of materials which essentially consists of
savings from the food-stuffs supplied to the mother. And these savings
are [151] in such a physical and chemical condition that the organism
of the child can easily convert them into work-stuff. That is to say,
by borrowing directly from the vital capital of the mother, indirectly
from the store in the natural bodies accessible to her, it can make
good the loss of its own. The operation of borrowing, however,
involves further work; that is, the labour of sucking, which is a
mechanical operation of much the same nature as breathing. The child
thus pays for the capital it borrows in labour; but as the value in
work-stuff of the milk obtained is very far greater than the value of
that labour, estimated by the consumption of work-stuff it involves,
the operation yields a large profit to the infant. The overplus of
food-stuff suffices to increase the child's capital of work-stuff; and
to supply not only the materials for the enlargement of the "buildings
and machinery" which is expressed by the child's growth, but also the
energy required to put all these materials together, and to carry them
to their proper places. Thus, throughout the years of infancy, and so
long thereafter as the youth or man is not thrown upon his own
resources, he lives by consuming the vital capital provided by others.
To use a terminology which is more common than appropriate, whatever
work he performs (and he does a good deal, if only in mere locomotion)
is unproductive.
[152] Let us now suppose the child come to man's estate in the
condition of a wandering savage, dependent for his food upon what he
can pick up or catch, after the fashion of the Australian aborigines.
It is plain that the place of mother, as the supplier of vital
capital, is now taken by the fruits, seeds, and roots of plants and by
various kinds of animals. It is they alone which contain stocks of
those substances which can be converted within the man's organism into
work-stuff; and of the other matters, except air and water, required
to supply the constant consumption of his capital and to keep his
organic machinery going. In no way does the savage contribute to the
production of these substances. Whatever labour he bestows upon such
vegetable and animal bodies, on the contrary, is devoted to their
destruction; and it is a mere matter of accident whether a little
labour yields him a great deal--as in the case, for example, of a
stranded whale; or whether much labour yields next to nothing--as in
times of long-continued drought. The savage, like the child, borrows
the capital he needs, and, at any rate, intentionally, does nothing
towards repayment; it would plainly be an improper use of the word
"produce" to say that his labour in hunting for the roots, or the
fruits, or the eggs, or the grubs and snakes, which he finds and eats,
"produces" or contributes to "produce" them. The same thing is true
of more advanced tribes, who [153] are still merely hunters, such as
the Esquimaux. They may expend more labour and skill; but it is spent
in destruction.
When we pass from these to men who lead a purely pastoral life, like
the South American Gauchos, or some Asiatic nomads, there is an
important change. Let us suppose the owner of a flock of sheep to live
on the milk, cheese, and flesh which they yield. It is obvious that
the flock stands to him in the economic relation of the mother to the
child, inasmuch as it supplies him with food-stuffs competent to make
good the daily and hourly losses of his capital of workstuff. If we
imagine our sheep-owner to have access to extensive pastures and to be
troubled neither by predacious animals nor by rival shepherds, the
performance of his pastoral functions will hardly involve the
expenditure of any more labour than is needful to provide him with the
exercise required to maintain health. And this is true, even if we
take into account the trouble originally devoted to the domestication
of the sheep. It surely would be a most singular pretension for the
shepherd to talk of the flock as the "produce" of his labour in any
but a very limited sense. In truth, his labour would have been a mere
accessory of production of very little consequence. Under the
circumstances supposed, a ram and some ewes, left to themselves for a
few years, would probably generate as large a flock; [154] and the
superadded labour of the shepherd would have little more effect upon
their production than upon that of the blackberries on the bushes
about the pastures. For the most part the increment would be
thoroughly unearned; and, if it is a rule of absolute political ethics
that owners have no claim upon "betterment" brought about
independently of their own labour, then the shepherd would have no
claim to at least nine-tenths of the increase of the flock.
But if the shepherd has no real claim to the title of "producer," who
has? Are the rams and ewes the true "producers"? Certainly their
title is better if, borrowing from the old terminology of chemistry,
they only claim to be regarded as the "proximate principles" of
production. And yet, if strict justice is to be dispensed, even they
are to be regarded rather as collectors and distributors than as
"producers." For all that they really do is to collect, slightly
modify, and render easily accessible, the vital capital which already
exists in the green herbs on which they feed, but in such a form as to
be practically out of the reach of man.
Thus, from an economic point of view, the sheep are more comparable to
confectioners than to producers. The usefulness of biscuit lies in the
raw flour of which it is made; but raw flour does not answer as an
article of human diet, and biscuit does. So the usefulness of mutton
lies mainly in certain chemical compounds which it [155] contains: the
sheep gets them out of grass; we cannot live on grass, but we can on
mutton.
Now, herbaceous and all other green plants stand alone among
terrestrial natural bodies, in so far as, under the influence of
light, they possess the power to build up, out of the carbonic acid
gas in the atmosphere, water and certain nitrogenous and mineral
salts, those substances which in the animal organism are utilised as
work-stuff. They are the chief and, for practical purposes, the sole
producers of that vital capital which we have seen to be the necessary
antecedent of every act of labour. Every green plant is a laboratory
in which, so long as the sun shines upon it, materials furnished by
the mineral world, gases, water, saline compounds, are worked up into
those foodstuffs without which animal life cannot be carried on. And
since, up to the present time, synthetic chemistry has not advanced so
far as to achieve this feat, the green plant may be said to be the
only living worker whose labour directly results in the production of
that vital capital which is the necessary antecedent of human labour.*
Nor is this statement a paradox involving perpetual motion, because
the energy by which the plant does its work is supplied by the
sun--the primordial capitalist so far as we are concerned. But [156]
it cannot be too strongly impressed upon the mind that sunshine, air,
water, the best soil that is to be found on the surface of the earth,
might co-exist; yet without plants, there is no known agency competent
to generate the so-called "protein compounds," by which alone animal
life can be permanently supported. And not only are plants thus
essential; but, in respect of particular kinds of animals, they must
be plants of a particular nature. If there were no terrestrial green
plants but, say, cypresses and mosses, pastoral and agricultural life
would be alike impossible; indeed, it is difficult to imagine the
possibility of the existence of any large animal, as the labour
required to get at a sufficiency of the store of food-stuffs,
contained in such plants as these, could hardly extract from them an
equivalent for the waste involved in that expenditure of work.
* It remains to be seen whether the plants which have no
chlorophyll, and flourish in darkness, such as the Fungi, can
live upon purely mineral food.
We are compact of dust and air; from that we set out, and to that
complexion must we come at last. The plant either directly, or by some
animal intermediary, lends us the capital which enables us to carry on
the business of life, as we flit through the upper world, from the one
term of our journey to the other. Popularly, no doubt, it is
permissible to speak of the soil as a "producer," just as we may talk
of the daily movement of the sun. But, as I have elsewhere remarked,
propositions which are to bear any deductive strain that may be put
upon them must run the risk of [157] seeming pedantic, rather than
that of being inaccurate. And the statement that land, in the sense of
cultivable soil, is a producer, or even one of the essentials of
economic production, is anything but accurate. The process of
water-culture, in which a plant is not "planted" in any soil, but is
merely supported in water containing in solution the mineral
ingredients essential to that plant, is now thoroughly understood;
and, if it were worth while, a crop yielding abundant food-stuffs
could be raised on an acre of fresh water, no less than on an acre of
dry land. In the Arctic regions, again, land has nothing to do with
"production" in the social economy of the Esquimaux, who live on seals
and other marine animals; and might, like Proteus, shepherd the flocks
of Poseidon if they had a mind for pastoral life. But the seals and
the bears are dependent on other inhabitants of the sea, until,
somewhere in the series, we come to the minute green plants which
float in the ocean, and are the real "producers" by which the whole of
its vast animal population is supported.* Thus, when we find set forth
as an "absolute" [158] truth the statement that the essential factors
in economic production are land, capital and labour--when this is
offered as an axiom whence all sorts of other important truths may be
deduced--it is needful to remember that the assertion is true only
with a qualification. Undoubtedly "vital capital" is essential; for,
as we have seen, no human work can be done unless it exists, not even
that internal work of the body which is necessary to passive life.
But, with respect to labour (that is, human labour) I hope to have
left no doubt on the reader's mind that, in regard to production, the
importance of human labour may be so small as to be almost a vanishing
quantity. Moreover, it is certain that there is no approximation to a
fixed ratio between the expenditure of labour and the production of
that vital capital which is the foundation of all wealth. For, suppose
that we introduce into our suppositious pastoral paradise beasts of
prey and rival shepherds, the amount of labour thrown upon the
sheep-owner may increase almost indefinitely, and its importance as a
condition of production may be enormously augmented, while the
quantity of produce remains stationary. Compare for a moment the
unimportance of the shepherd's labour, under the circumstances first
defined, with its indispensability in countries in which the water for
the sheep has to be drawn from deep [159] wells, or in which the flock
has to be defended from wolves or from human depredators. As to land,
it has been shown that, except as affording mere room and standing
ground, the importance of land, great as it may be, is secondary. The
one thing needful for economic production is the green plant, as the
sole producer of vital capital from natural inorganic bodies. Men
might exist without labour (in the ordinary sense) and without land;
without plants they must inevitably perish.
* In some remarkable passages of the Botany of Sir James Ross's
Antarctic voyage, which took place half a century ago, Sir
Joseph Hooker demonstrated the dependence of the animal life of
the sea upon the minute, indeed microscopic, plants which float
in it: a marvellous example of what may be done by
water-culture. One might indulge in dreams of cultivating and
improving diatoms, until the domesticated bore the same
relation to the wild forms, as cauliflowers to the primitive
Brassica oleracea, without passing beyond the limits of fair
scientific speculation.
That which is true of the purely pastoral condition is a fortiori true
of the purely agricultural* condition, in which the existence of the
cultivator is directly dependent on the production of vital capital by
the plants which he cultivates. Here, again, the condition precedent
of the work of each year is vital capital. Suppose that a man lives
exclusively upon the plants which he cultivates. It is obvious that he
must have food-stuffs to live upon, while he prepares the soil for
sowing and throughout the period which elapses between this and
harvest. These food-stuffs must be yielded by the stock remaining over
from former crops. The result is the same as before--the pre-existence
of vital capital is the necessary antecedent of labour. Moreover, the
amount of labour which contributes, as an accessory condition, to the
production [160] of the crop varies as widely in the case of
plant-raising as in that of cattle-raising. With favourable soil,
climate and other conditions, it may be very small, with unfavourable,
very great, for the same revenue or yield of food-stuffs.
* It is a pity that we have no word that signifies plant-culture
exclusively. But for the present purpose I may restrict
agriculture to that sense.
Thus, I do not think it is possible to dispute the following
proposition: the existence of any man, or of any number of men,
whether organised into a polity or not, depends on the production of
foodstuffs (that is, vital capital) readily accessible to man, either
directly or indirectly, by plants. But it follows that the number of
men who can exist, say for one year, on any given area of land, taken
by itself, depends upon the quantity of food-stuffs produced by such
plants growing on the area in one year. If a is that quantity, and b
the minimum of food-stuffs required for each man, A/B=N, the maximum
number of men who can exist on the area. Now the amount of production
(a) is limited by the extent of area occupied; by the quantity of
sunshine which falls upon the area; by the range and distribution of
temperature; by the force of the winds; by the supply of water; by the
composition and the physical characters of the soil; by animal and
vegetable competitors and destroyers. The labour of man neither does,
nor can, produce vital capital; all that it can do is to modify,
favourably or unfavourably, the conditions of its production. The most
important of these-- [161] namely, sunshine, range of daily and
nightly temperature, wind--are practically out of men's reach.* On the
other hand, the supply of water, the physical and chemical qualities
of the soil, and the influences of competitors and destroyers, can
often, though by no means always, be largely affected by labour and
skill. And there is no harm in calling the effect of such labour
"production," if it is clearly understood that "production" in this
sense is a very different thing from the "production" of food-stuffs
by a plant.
* I do not forget electric lighting, greenhouses and hothouses,
and the various modes of affording shelter against violent
winds: but in regard to production of food-stuffs on the large
scale they may be neglected. Even if synthetic chemistry should
effect the construction of proteids, the Laboratory will
hardly enter into competition with the Farm within any time
which the present generation need trouble itself about.
We have been dealing hitherto with suppositions the materials of which
are furnished by everyday experience, not with mere a priori
assumptions. Our hypothetical solitary shepherd with his flock, or the
solitary farmer with his grain field, are mere bits of such
experience, cut out, as it were, for easy study. Still borrowing from
daily experience, let us suppose that either sheep-owner or farmer,
for any reason that may be imagined, desires the help of one or more
other men; and that, in exchange for their labour, he offers so many
sheep, or quarts of milk, or pounds of [162] cheese, or so many
measures of grain, for a year's service. I fail to discover any a
priori "rights of labour" in virtue of which these men may insist on
being employed, if they are not wanted. But, on the other hand, I
think it is clear that there is only one condition upon which the
persons to whom the offer of these "wages" is made can accept it; and
that is that the things offered in exchange for a year's work shall
contain at least as much vital capital as a man uses up in doing the
year's work. For no rational man could knowingly and willingly accept
conditions which necessarily involve starvation. Therefore there is an
irreducible minimum of wages; it is such an amount of vital capital as
suffices to replace the inevitable consumption of the person hired.
Now, surely, it is beyond a doubt that these wages, whether at or
above the irreducible minimum, are paid out of the capital disposable
after the wants of the owner of the flock or of the crop of grain are
satisfied; and, from what has been said already, it follows that there
is a limit to the number of men, whether hired, or brought in any other
way, who can be maintained by the sheep owner or landowner out of his
own resources. Since no amount of labour can produce an ounce of
foodstuff beyond the maximum producible by a limited number of plants,
under the most favourable circumstances in regard to those conditions
which are not affected by labour, it follows [163] that, if the number
of men to be fed increases indefinitely, a time must come when some
will have to starve. That is the essence of the so-called Malthusian
doctrine; and it is a truth which, to my mind, is as plain as the
general proposition that a quantity which constantly increases will,
some time or other, exceed any greater quantity the amount of which is
fixed.
The foregoing considerations leave no doubt about the fundamental
condition of the existence of any polity, or organised society of men,
either in a purely pastoral or purely agricultural state, or in any
mixture of both states. It must possess a store of vital capital to
start with, and the means of repairing the consumption of that capital
which takes place as a consequence of the work of the members of the
society. And, if the polity occupies a completely isolated area of the
earth's surface, the numerical strength of that polity can never
exceed the quotient of the maximum quantity of food-stuffs producible
by the green plants on that area, in each year, divided by the
quantity necessary for the maintenance of each person during the year.
But, there is a third mode of existence possible to a polity; it may,
conceivably, be neither purely pastoral nor purely agricultural, but
purely manufacturing. Let us suppose three islands, like Gran Canaria,
Teneriffe and Lanzerote, in the Canaries, to be quite cut off from the
rest of the world. Let Gran Canaria be [164] inhabited by
grain-raisers, Teneriffe by cattle-breeders; while the population of
Lanzerote (which we may suppose to be utterly barren) consists of
carpenters, woollen manufacturers, and shoemakers. Then the facts of
daily experience teach us that the people of Lanzerote could never
have existed unless they came to the island provided with a stock of
food-stuffs; and that they could not continue to exist, unless that
stock, as it was consumed, was made up by contributions from the vital
capital of either Gran Canaria, or Teneriffe, or both. Moreover, the
carpenters of Lanzerote could do nothing, unless they were provided
with wood from the other islands; nor could the wool spinners and
weavers or the shoemakers work without wool and skins from the same
sources. The wood and the wool and the skins are, in fact, the capital
without which their work as manufacturers in their respective trades
is impossible--so that the vital and other capital supplied by Gran
Canaria and Teneriffe is most indubitably the necessary antecedent of
the industrial labour of Lanzerote. It is perfectly true that by the
time the wood, the wool, and the skins reached Lanzerote a good deal
of labour in cutting, shearing, skinning, transport, and so on, would
have been spent upon them. But this does not alter the fact that the
only "production" which is essential to the existence of the
population of Teneriffe and Gran Canaria is that effected by the [165]
green plants in both islands; and that all the labour spent upon the
raw produce useful in manufacture, directly or indirectly yielded by
them--by the inhabitants of these islands and by those of Lanzerote
into the bargain--will not provide one solitary Lanzerotian with a
dinner, unless the Teneriffians and Canariotes happen to want his
goods and to be willing to give some of their vital capital in
exchange for them.
Under the circumstances defined, if Teneriffe and Gran Canaria
disappeared, or if their inhabitants ceased to care for carpentry,
clothing, or shoes, the people of Lanzerote must starve. But if they
wish to buy, then the Lanzerotians, by "cultivating" the buyers,
indirectly favour the cultivation of the produce of those buyers.
Thus, if the question is asked whether the labour employed in
manufacture in Lanzerote is "productive" or "unproductive" there can
be only one reply. If anybody will exchange vital capital, or that
which can be exchanged for vital capital, for Lanzerote goods, it is
productive; if not, it is unproductive.
In the case of the manufacturer, the dependence of labour upon capital
is still more intimate than in that of the herdsman or agriculturist.
When the latter are once started they can go on, without troubling
themselves about the existence of any other people. But the
manufacturer depends on pre-existing capital, not only at the [166]
beginning, but at the end of his operations. However great the
expenditure of his labour and of his skill, the result, for the
purpose of maintaining his existence, is just the same as if he had
done nothing, unless there is a customer able and willing to exchange
food-stuffs for that which his labour and skill have achieved.
There is another point concerning which it is very necessary to have
clear ideas. Suppose a carpenter in Lanzerote to be engaged in making
chests of drawers. Let us suppose that a, the timber, and b, the grain
and meat needful for the man's sustenance until he can finish a chest
of drawers, have to be paid for by that chest. Then the capital with
which he starts is represented by a + b. He could not start at all
unless he had it; day by day, he must destroy more or less of the
substance and of the general adaptability of a in order to work it up
into the special forms needed to constitute the chest of drawers; and,
day by day, he must use up at least so much of b as will replace his
loss of vital capital by the work of that day. Suppose it takes the
carpenter and his workmen ten days to saw up the timber, to plane the
boards, and to give them the shape and size proper for the various
parts of the chest of drawers. And suppose that he then offers his
heap of boards to the advancer of a + b as an equivalent for the wood
+ ten days' supply of vital capital? The latter will surely say: "No.
[167] I did not ask for a heap of boards. I asked for a chest of
drawers. Up to this time, so far as I am concerned, you have done
nothing and are as much in my debt as ever." And if the carpenter
maintained that he had "virtually" created two-thirds of a chest of
drawers, inasmuch as it would take only five days more to put together
the pieces of wood, and that the heap of boards ought to be accepted
as the equivalent of two-thirds of his debt, I am afraid the creditor
would regard him as little better than an impudent swindler. It
obviously makes no sort of difference whether the Canariote or
Teneriffian buyer advanced the wood and the food-stuffs, on which the
carpenter had to maintain himself; or whether the carpenter had a stock
of both, the consumption of which must be recouped by the exchange of
a chest of drawers for a fresh supply. In the latter case, it is even
less doubtful that, if the carpenter offered his boards to the man who
wanted a chest of drawers, the latter would laugh in his face. And if
he took the chest of drawers for himself, then so much of his vital
capital would be sunk in it past recovery. Again, the payment of goods
in a lump, for the chest of drawers, comes to the same thing as the
payment of daily wages for the fifteen days that the carpenter was
occupied in making it. If, at the end of each day, the carpenter chose
to say to himself "I have 'virtually' created, by my day's labour, a
fifteenth of what I shall get for the chest [168] of
drawers--therefore my wages are the produce of my day's labour"--there
is no great harm in such metaphorical speech, so long as the poor man
does not delude himself into the supposition that it represents the
exact truth. "Virtually" is apt to cover more intellectual sins than
"charity" does moral delicts. After what has been said, it surely must
be plain enough that each day's work has involved the consumption of
the carpenter's vital capital, and the fashioning of his timber, at
the expense of more or less consumption of those forms of capital.
Whether the a + b to be exchanged for the chest has been advanced as a
loan, or is paid daily or weekly as wages, or, at some later time, as
the price of a finished commodity--the essential element of the
transaction, and the only essential element, is, that it must, at
least, effect the replacement of the vital capital consumed. Neither
boards nor chest of drawers are eatable; and, so far from the
carpenter having produced the essential part of his wages by each
day's labour, he has merely wasted that labour, unless somebody who
happens to want a chest of drawers offers to exchange vital capital,
or something that can procure it, equivalent to the amount consumed
during the process of manufacture.*
* See the discussion of this subject further on.
That it should be necessary, at this time of day, to set forth such
elementary truths as these may [169] well seem strange; but no one who
consults that interesting museum of political delusions, "Progress and
Poverty," some of the treasures of which I have already brought to
light, will doubt the fact, if he bestows proper attention upon the
first book of that widely-read work. At page 15 it is thus written:
"The proposition I shall endeavour to prove is: that wages, instead of
being drawn from capital, are, in reality, drawn from the product of
the labour for which they are paid."