Property and Progress Author:William Hurrell Mallock Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for the hitherto current falsehood; and, the moment we have done so, a new light will break on us. "For if each laborer," he argues, "in performing the labor, re... more »ally creates the fund from which his wages are drawn, these wages cannot be diminished by the iucrease of laborers ; but on the contrary, as the efficiency of labor manifestly increases with the number of laborers, the more laborers, other things being equal, the higher should wages be." This, however, says Mr. George, is only half the matter. It will avail us little to have demolished the current theory of wages, unless we demolish also the current theory of population. It will be observed, he says, that, in the inference just quoted, he has been obliged to make a proviso, — " other things being equal." He supposes, that is to say, that the productive powers of nature do not tend to diminish " with the increasing drafts made upon them by increasing population." But that is the very thing which at present the economists suppose they do; and he is thus led to the second point, in which he declares the economists to be wrong. "The current doctrine [he says] as to the derivation and law of wages, finds its strongest support in a doctrine generally accepted, — the doctrine to which Malthus has given his name, — that population naturally tends to jucfease faStef 4ijan subsistence; ... so that doubling the application of labor does not double the produce." To put the case more plainly, he quotes Mill's well-known statement of it: — '"A greater number of people cannot, in any given state of civilization, be collectively so well provided for as a smaller. The niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of society, is the cause of the penalty attached to over-population. An unjust distribution of wealth does not aggravat...« less