also be supposed to remain the same].
The money wages of labor are a compound result of two elements: first, real wages, or wages in kind, or, in other words, the quantity which the laborer obtains of the ordinary articles of consumption; and, secondly, the money prices of those articles. In all old countries—all countries in which the increase of population is in any degree checked by the [pg 467] difficulty of obtaining subsistence—the habitual money price of labor is that which will just enable the laborers, one with another, to purchase the commodities without which they either can not or will not keep up the population at its customary rate of increase. Their standard of comfort being given (and by the standard of comfort in a laboring class is meant that rather than forego which they will abstain from multiplication), money wages depend on the money price, and therefore on the cost of production, of the various articles which the laborers habitually consume: because, if their wages can not procure them a given quantity of these, their increase will slacken and their wages rise. Of these articles, food and other agricultural produce are so much the principal as to leave little influence to anything else.
It is at this point that we are enabled to invoke the aid of the principles which have been laid down in this Third Part. The cost of production of food and agricultural produce has been analyzed in a preceding chapter. It depends on the productiveness of the least fertile land, or of the least productively employed portion of capital, which the necessities of society have as yet put in requisition for agricultural purposes. The cost of production of the food grown in these least advantageous circumstances determines, as we have seen, the exchange value and money price of the whole. In any given state, therefore, of the laborers' habits, their money wages depend on the productiveness of the least fertile land, or least productive agricultural capital: