Even Mrs. Marcet, a docile Ricardian, had put the case more carefully. “_Work_ to be performed is the immediate cause of the demand for labour; but, however great or important is the work which a man may wish to undertake, the execution of it must always be limited by the extent of his capital, _i. e._ by the funds he possesses for the maintenance or payment of his labourers.”[621] She professes to be expounding the received doctrine of her day. MacCulloch’s exposition is much more rigid. When he speaks of the “funds devoted to the payment of wages,” he means “that portion of the capital or wealth of a country which the employers of labour _intend_ or _are willing_ to lay out in the purchase of labour.” It “may be larger at one time than at another. But, whatever be its magnitude, it obviously forms the only source from which any portion of the wages of labour can be derived. No other fund is in existence from which the labourers as such can draw a single shilling. And hence it follows that the average rate of wages or the share of the national capital appropriated to the employment of labour falling, at an average, to each labourer, must entirely depend on its amount as compared with the number of those amongst whom it has to be divided.”[622] Neither MacCulloch, nor James Mill, nor John Mill in his early writings, nor apparently any of the expounders of the theory, were in the habit of describing the fund as “unconditionally” devoted to the payment of wages, though John Mill, in restating the position after he abandoned it, gives us so to understand.[623] Something like unconditional determination, however, is assumed in all the reasonings of the school. Adam Smith’s frequent use of the words “funds devoted” or “funds determined” to this or that purpose may easily have been misunderstood. Certainly in his pages they mean no inflexible compulsion. He says the demand of those who live by wages can only increase in proportion to the increase of the “funds” which are “destined” for the payment of wages, these funds being (he adds) either the surplus revenue of an idle monied man who will “naturally” use any addition to them in increasing his staff of domestic servants, or the increased capital of the capitalist who will just as “naturally” use them in employing more workmen.[624] The word “destined” is so far, with him, from implying any iron necessity that it means simply “intended”; and the intention is one that can be foiled or altered. He speaks of the “funds destined for the consumption” of the manufacturing class,[625] and of the townsfolk’s “fund of subsistence,”[626] meaning simply their food; he even speaks of the funds destined for the repair of the high roads in France.[627] Even the strong passage in Book I. chap. viii., “the demand for those who live by wages necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue and stock of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it,” stops considerably short of the doctrine of a