The Distribution of Wealth: Or, The Economic Laws by which Wages and Profits are Determined |
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The Distribution of Wealth: Or, the Economic Laws by Which Wages and Profits ... Rufus Cope No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
accumulated acres Adam Smith aggregated wealth aggregation of wealth agricultural product agriculture American Atkinson average bushels capital employed capitalists census census of 1880 cent common competition consumed consumption cost credits demand distribution of wealth durable property duties earnings economic Edward Atkinson effect employés employment England estimate excess farm farmer five pence forces foreign income increase individual invested John Stuart Mill land large numbers legislation less limit loans machinery manufacturing industries Massachusetts measure million dollars mills monopoly mortgage nation natural monopolies number of persons one-half paid pence political economy population pounds products of labor profits of capital railways rate of interest reason reduced rent result revenue savings Scotland share of capital shillings social statistics supply tariff taxation taxes thousand dollars tion Total number total product trade true United United Kingdom usury Walker tariff wheat working-man working-people
Popular passages
Page 7 - Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.
Page 193 - Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.
Page 77 - This impossibility of ultimately avoiding the stationary state — this irresistible necessity that the stream of human industry should finally spread itself out into an apparently stagnant sea — must have been, to the political economists of the last two generations, an unpleasing and discouraging prospect ; for the tone and tendency of their speculations goes completely to identify all that is economically desirable with the progressive state, and with that alone.
Page 79 - This perpetual consumption and reproduction of capital affords the explanation of what has so often excited wonder, the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation...
Page 77 - It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this, and that each step in advance is an approach to it.
Page 193 - We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.
Page 193 - They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, laborers and journeymen.
Page 182 - Production is limited not solely by the quantity of capital and of labour, but also by the extent of the " field of employment." The field of employment for capital is twofold; the land of the country, and the capacity of foreign markets to take its manufactured commodities. On a limited extent of land, only a limited quantity of capital can find employment at a profit. As the quantity of capital approaches this limit, profit falls; when the limit is attained, profit is annihilated; and can only...
Page 179 - Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that, in every age and in every state in which man has existed or does now exist, The increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence...
Page 7 - ... there is collected a population in our great towns which equals in amount the whole of those who lived in England and Wales six centuries ago ; but whose condition is more destitute, whose homes are more squalid, whose means are more uncertain, whose prospects are more hopeless than those of the poorest serfs of the middle ages and the meanest drudges of the mediaeval cities.