of hardness and disagreeableness.
Competition, however, must be regarded, in the present state of society, as the principal regulator of wages, and custom [pg 178] or individual character only as a modifying circumstance, and that in a comparatively slight degree.
Wages, then, depend mainly upon the demand and supply of labor; or, as it is often expressed, on the proportion between population and capital. By population is here meant the number only of the laboring-class, or rather of those who work for hire; and by capital, only circulating capital, and not even the whole of that, but the part which is expended in the direct purchase of labor. To this, however, must be added all funds which, without forming a part of capital, are paid in exchange for labor, such as the wages of soldiers, domestic servants, and all other unproductive laborers. There is unfortunately no mode of expressing, by one familiar term, the aggregate of what may be called the wages-fund of