Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital [17]
of them except the first is dependent for his supply of materials on him, and of what use would his thread be unless the others took it from him, and each performed that part of the task which is necessary to complete the cloth? Wherever the spinner purchases the cotton or wool, the price which he can obtain for his thread, over and above what he paid for the raw material, is the reward of his labour. But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility. Wherever the division of labour is introduced, therefore, the judgment of other men intervenes before the labourer can realise his earnings, and there is no longer any thing which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part having no value or utility of itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: "This is my product, this will I keep to myself." Between the commencement of any joint operation, such as that of making cloth, and the division of its product among the different persons whose combined exertions have produced it, the judgment of men must intervene several times, and the question is, how much of this joint product should go to each of the individuals whose united labourers produce it? I know no way of deciding this but by leaving it to be settled by the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves. If all kinds of labour were perfectly free, if no unfounded prejudice invested some parts, and perhaps the least useful, of the social task with great honour, while other parts are very improperly branded with disgrace, there would be no difficulty on this point, and the wages of individual labour would be justly settled by what Dr Smith calls the "higgling of the market." Unfortunately, labour is not, in general, free; and, unfortunately there are a number of prejudices which decree very different rewards to different species of labour from those which each of them merits. Unfortunately, also, there is, I think, in general, a disposition to restrict the term labour to the operation of the hands. But if it should be said that the skill of the practised labourer is a mere mechanical sort of thing, nobody will deny that the labour by which he acquired that skill was a mental exertion. The exercise of that skill also, as it seems to me, requiring the constant application of judgment, depends much more on a mental than on a bodily acquirement. Probably the mere capacity of muscular exertion is as great, or greater, among a tribe of Indians as among the most productive Europeans; and the superior productive power of Europeans, and of one nation over another, arise from the different nature of their fixed capital. But I have shown that the greater efficacy of fixed capital depends on the skill of the labourer; so that we come to the conclusion that not mere labour, but mental skill, or the mode in which labour is directed, determines its productive powers. I therefore would caution my fellow labourers not to limit the term labour to the operations of the hands. Before many of our most useful machines and instruments could be invented, a vast deal of knowledge gathered in the progress of the world by many generations was necessary. At present also a great number of persons possessed of different kinds of knowledge and skill must combine and cooperate, although they have never entered into any express contract for this purpose, before many of our most powerful machines can be completed and before thy can be used. The labour of the draughtsman is as necessary to construct a ship as the labour of the man who fastens her planks together. The labour of the engineer, who "in his mind's eye" sees the effect of every contrivance, and who adapts the parts of a complicated machine to each other, is as necessary to the completion of that machine as the man who casts or fits any part of it, without being sensible of the purpose for which the whole is to serve. In like manner the labour and the knowledge