This law of wages may be difficult for those to comprehend who are not thoroughly familiar with economic discussions. In order to make it clearer, I will quote, with a few changes and abbreviations, a passage of some length from John Stuart Mill,[188] giving a lucid explanation of the law. “Mr. Ricardo assumes,” says Mill, “that there is everywhere a minimum rate of wages—either the lowest with which it is physically possible to keep up the population, or the lowest with which the people will choose to do. To this minimum he assumes that the general rate of wages always tends; that they can never be lower beyond the length of time required for a diminished rate of increase to make itself felt, and can never long continue higher. This assumption contains sufficient truth to render it admissible for the purposes of abstract science.... But in the application to practice it is necessary to consider that the minimum of which he speaks, especially when it is not a physical, but what may be termed a moral minimum, is itself liable to vary.” A rise of the price of food will permanently lower the standard of living of laborers, “in case their previous habits in respect of population prove stronger than their previous habits in respect of comfort. In that case the injury done to them will be permanent, and their deteriorated condition will become a new minimum, tending to perpetuate itself as the more ample minimum did before.” It is to be feared that this is the way in which a rise in the price of provisions usually operates. “There is considerable evidence that the circumstances of the agricultural laborers in England have more than once in our history sustained great permanent deterioration from causes which operated by diminishing the demand for labor, and which, if population had exercised its power of self-adjustment, in obedience to the previous standard of comfort, could only have had a temporary effect; but, unhappily, the poverty in which the class was plunged during a long series of years brought that previous standard into disuse, and the next generation, growing up without having possessed those pristine comforts, multiplied in turn without any attempt to retrieve them.” ... The salutary effect of a fall in the price of food is of no permanent value “if laborers content themselves with enjoying the greater comfort while it lasts, but do not learn to require it.... If from poverty their children had previously been insufficiently fed or improperly nursed, a greater number will now be reared, and the competition of these, when they grow up, will depress wages probably in full proportion to the greater cheapness of food. If the effect is not produced in this mode, it will be produced by earlier and more numerous marriages, or by an increased number of births to a marriage.” I believe Mill renders the law as plain as it can be made, without entering into subjects foreign to this work. The standpoint is this: labor is a commodity, like wheat