pleasures.[618] He has often the choice before him to spend more on fixtures, or more on new hands, or more on further employment of the old hands. In truth, too, though wages, especially in England, are often in the first instance advanced out of capital, they are always meant to be paid out of the gross returns, and in every sound business really are so. The workman and employer make their contract beforehand, and expect each other to abide by it, be the profit much or little; the wages depend, therefore, directly on this contract, and indirectly on that which is the means of fulfilling the contract on the master’s side, the price of the article made. The price of the article is the real wages fund;[619] and therefore the wages fund must be as flexible as market prices, and the actual wages as changeable as are the powers, habits, and desires of the two contracting parties. The theory of a wages fund was formed from the facts of a perfectly exceptional time, and on the strength of two truths misapplied, the doctrine of Malthus (on Population) in its most unripe form, and of Ricardo (on Value) in its most abstract. J. R. MacCulloch seems to have been the first who put the two together to deduce a rigid law of wages. “The market rate of wages,” he says, “is exclusively dependent on the proportion which the capital of the country, or the means of employing labour, bears to the number of labourers. There is plainly, therefore, only one way of really improving the condition of the great majority of the community or of the labouring class, and that is by increasing the ratio of capital to population,” which the labourers for their part can only do by diminishing the supply of labour.[620]