sense of the word, “among the mass of the people, and not an excess of it in a few,” that seems to be advantageous, both for national wealth and national happiness. Paley’s ideal of national prosperity, “a laborious frugal people ministering to the demands of an opulent luxurious nation,” is heartily scouted by him. The luxuries of the few rich, he says, harass the industry of the poor by varying with the fashion; but the luxuries of the poor, when embodied in their general standard of living, are not only the best kind of check to population, but the steadiest encouragement to general trade.[614] He seems to have supposed the elevation in the standard of living to have been effected, like the progress of nations in civilization, by the happy improvement of an accidental advantage, by the retention of high wages, when once secured in a time of brisk trade in the ordinary way of competition; the workmen, in short, succeeded in making permanent and _de jure_ a change once _de facto_ for the time effected.[615] “When our wages of labour in wheat were high in the early part of the last century, it did not appear that they were employed merely in the maintenance of more families, but in improving the condition of the people in their general mode of living.”[616] Malthus, without knowing it, was certainly father of the theory of a Wages Fund. The theory is that the average wages of the labouring classes at any given time are high or low in proportion to the great or small amount of circulating capital devoted to the payment of wages, or, as it is sometimes expressed (more tersely and inexactly), wages depend on “the ratio of population to capital.” This might mean no more than the arithmetical truism that we may always find the average wages by dividing the total sum received by the total number of recipients; and the quotient would be unalterable only in the sense in which all other facts might be said to be so, in retrospect. But it is usually taken to mean that the first total could not at any given time have been greater or less than it actually was, being fixed unalterably by circumstances,[617] and so “devoted” or “determined” to the payment of wages. The simplest test of this theory is the application of it to the case of a single individual capitalist and his payments in wages. Suppose he has a capital of £10,000, £5000 fixed and £5000 circulating; and suppose that the latter means wages only (instead of chiefly), and is paid to one hundred men;—£50 a year will be the average wages of the hundred men; and, by the theory, given the rate of ordinary profits and given the “desire of accumulation” at the time and place, it could not possibly have been either more or less. But, as the profits are not unconditional, neither are the wages; the capitalist might conceivably, to save his business, keep it up in bad times at a loss, and pay wages at the expense of profits and at the expense of his personal