It is futile to deny the justice of the argument. When cheapness is only obtained at the cost of permanent deterioration in the health of the workers, competition evidently is a producer of evil rather than of good. The public interest is no less concerned with the preservation of vital wealth than it is with facilitating the production of material wealth. Sismondi showed that competition was a double-edged sword, and in doing so he prepared the way for those who very justly demand that the State should place limits upon its use and prescribe rules for its employment. We might be tempted to go farther and see in the passage just cited an unreserved condemnation of profits even. That would involve placing Sismondi among the socialists, and this is sometimes done, although, as we think, wrongly. In certain passages he doubtless expresses himself in a manner similar to Owen, the Saint-Simonians, and Marx. Thus in his studies on political economy we come across phrases such as the following: “We might almost say that modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat, seeing that it curtails the reward of his toil.”[395] And elsewhere: “Spoliation indeed we have, for do we not find the rich robbing the poor? They draw in their revenues from the fertile, easily cultivated fields and wallow in their wealth, while the cultivator who created that revenue is dying of hunger, never allowed to enjoy any of it.”[396] We might even say that Sismondi enunciated the theory of surplus value, which was worked out by Marx, when he makes use of the term _mieux value_.[397] But the similarity is simply a matter of words. Sismondi, speaking of surplus value, means to imply the value that is constantly growing or being created every year in a progressive country, not by the effort of labour alone, but by the joint operation of capital and labour.[398] Marx’s idea that labour alone created value, and that consequently profit and interest constituted a theft, is entirely foreign to Sismondi. Sismondi, indeed, recognised that the revenues of landed proprietors and capitalists were due to efforts which they themselves had never put forth. He rightly distinguished between the wages of labour and the revenues of proprietors, but to him the latter were not less legitimate than the former, for, says he, “the beneficiaries who enjoy such revenues without making any corresponding effort have acquired a permanent claim to them in virtue of toil undertaken at some former period, which must have increased the productivity of labour.”[399] When Sismondi says that the worker is robbed he merely means to say that _sometimes_ the worker is insufficiently paid; in other words, that he does not always receive enough remuneration to keep him alive, and were it only for the sake of humanity that he ought to be better paid. But he does not consider that appropriation by proprietors or capitalists of a portion of the social