ratio between population and capital [taking into account the nature of a country's industries]; and would do so if all the capital in the world were the property of one association, or if the capitalists among [pg 466] whom it is shared maintained each an establishment for the production of every article consumed in the community, exchange of commodities having no existence. As the ratio between capital and population, everywhere but in new colonies, depends on the strength of the checks by which the too rapid increase of population is restrained, it may be said, popularly speaking, that wages depend on the checks to population; that, when the check is not death by starvation or disease, wages depend on the prudence of the laboring people; and that wages in any country are habitually at the lowest rate to which in that country the laborer will suffer them to be depressed rather than put a restraint upon multiplication.
What is here meant, however, by wages, is the laborer's real scale of comfort; the quantity he obtains of the things which nature or habit has made necessary or agreeable to him: wages in the sense in which they are of importance to the receiver. In the sense in which they are of importance to the payer, they do not depend exclusively on such simple principles. Wages in the first sense, the wages on which the laborer's comfort depends, we will call real wages, or wages in kind. Wages in the second sense we may be permitted to call, for the present, money wages; assuming, as it is allowable to do, that money remains for the time an invariable standard, no alteration taking place in the conditions under which the circulating medium itself is produced or obtained. If money itself undergoes no variation in cost, the money price of labor is an exact measure of the cost of labor, and may be made use of as a convenient symbol to express it [if the efficiency of labor