The
working class, if it suffers only temporarily, never profits by it,
since, by your own showing, they displace a portion of the national
labour, without diminishing it, it is true, but also without increasing
it."
I do not pretend, in this slight treatise, to answer every objection;
the only end I have in view, is to combat a vulgar, widely spread, and
dangerous prejudice. I want to prove that a new machine only causes the
discharge of a certain number of hands, when the remuneration which pays
them is abstracted by force. These hands and this remuneration would
combine to produce what it was impossible to produce before the
invention; whence it follows, that the final result is _an increase of
advantages for equal labour_.
Who is the gainer by these additional advantages?
First, it is true, the capitalist, the inventor; the first who succeeds
in using the machine; and this is the reward of his genius and courage.
In this case, as we have just seen, he effects a saving upon the expense
of production, which, in whatever way it may be spent (and it always is
spent), employs exactly as many hands as the machine caused to be
dismissed.
But soon competition obliges him to lower his prices in proportion to
the saving itself; and then it is no longer the inventor who reaps the
benefit of the invention--it is the purchaser of what is produced, the
consumer, the public, including the workman; in a word, mankind.
Pages:
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106