His charge against the present system, however, is more than that it is anarchic; he maintains it to be unjust--organically and hopelessly unjust. The labourer's back is the green table on which the whole game is played, and all losses are in the end sustained by him. A slightly unfavourable turn of things sends him at once into want, while even a considerably favourable one brings him no corresponding advantage, for, according to all economists, wages are always the last thing to rise with a reviving trade. The present system is, in fact, incapable of doing the labourer justice, and would not suffer employers to do so even if they wished. Injustice is bred in its very bone and blood. In this contention Lassalle builds his whole argument on premises drawn from the accepted economic authorities. Socialist economics, he says, is nothing but a battle against Ricardo, whom he describes as the last and most representative development of _bourgeois_ economics; and it fights the battle with Ricardo's own weapons, and on Ricardo's own ground. There are two principles in particular of which it makes much use--Ricardo's law of value and Ricardo's law of natural or necessary wages. Ricardo's law of value is that the value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour. Value is thus resolved into so much labour, or what is the same thing, so much time consumed in labour, mental and manual, upon the commodity. This reduction of value to quantity of time is reckoned by Lassalle the one great merit of Ricardo and the English economists. Ricardo, however, strictly limited his law to commodities that admitted of indefinite multiplication, the value of other commodities being, he held, regulated by their scarcity; and he confined it to the normal value of the commodities only, the fluctuations of their market-price depending on other considerations. But Lassalle seeks to make it cover these cases also by means of a distinction he draws between individual time of labour, and socially necessary time of labour. According to this distinction, what constitutes the value of a product is not the time actually taken or required by the person who made it; for he may have been indolent or slow, or may not have used the means and appliances which the age he lived in afforded him. What constitutes value is the average time of labour socially necessary, the time required by labour of average efficiency using the methods the age supplies. If the commodity can be produced in an hour, an hour's work will be its value, though you have taken ten to produce it by slower methods. So far there is nothing very remarkable, but Lassalle goes on to argue that you may waste your time not merely by using methods that society has superseded,