Note 178-5 — Chapter III

Compare Morrison, loc. cit. Quarterly Rev., Jan. 1872, 260. The English savings in the savings banks, between 1839 and 1846, increased yearly in amount only £1,408,630, and scarcely half of this came from wages-workmen in the narrower sense of the term. What the latter contribute to the fund for the old and sick is not really productive capital but only individually deferred consumption. Let us suppose that a man had an income of $3,000 a year, of which he laid out yearly $2,000 ($1,000 for wages, $1,000 for rent and interest[TN 18] on capital), and that he capitalizes $1,000. If now this man were, either through philanthropy or in furtherance of socialism, to double the wages he paid, the result would not be detrimental to the economic interests of the whole country only on the supposition that working classes who received the increased wages should either save what he is no longer able to save, or that by inventions or greater personal skill, etc., they should increase the national income.