even if it were admitted that the low rate of wages was an advantage to the capitalist, do you think it fitting that labour should be kept permanently in a state bordering on distress, to avoid the injury that might accrue to the national wealth from diminishing the rate of profit?” he answered, “I should say, by no means fitting; I consider the labouring classes as forming the largest part of the nation, and therefore that their general condition is the most important of all.”[682] He thinks, however, that the change from low to high wages might quite possibly so reduce profits as to make trade unprofitable. We might need to sacrifice something of our commercial prosperity. He cannot rise to the conception of a society in which the entire body of workmen as consumers would be a sufficient market for the same body as producers. He cannot rid himself of the idea that a body of unproductive consumers is a social necessity, to give a stimulus to production by developing the wants which the manufactures are to satisfy. It seems easy to answer that those unproductive consumers can only pay for the manufactures by means of other products, whencesoever obtained, and there seems no reason why their producers should not obtain them.[683] If the workmen themselves had the wants and supplied them by their own labour, all the results that Malthus desires would be obtained without invidious distinctions of classes, and with distinct improvement in the condition of the workmen. His aims, at least, were good. The indispensable leisure would be secured if the hours of labour were shortened, as he desired them to be. “I have always thought and felt that many among the labouring classes in this country work too hard for their health, happiness, and intellectual improvement.”[684] The general wealth therefore, if need be, must be sacrificed to the general happiness. Factory Acts that would prevent children from labouring too young or too long[685] he thoroughly approves; though such Factory Acts as would interfere with adult labour he considers an injustice to the work-people themselves, and a hopeless interference with “the principles of competition, one of the most general principles by which the business of society is carried on.”[686] The salvation of the labouring classes must come from themselves, from their own “simultaneous resolution to work fewer hours in the day.” But trades unions, as we now know them, had not then come into being; and he talks of a future improvement of the working classes in knowledge, comfort, and self-restraint,[687] with much hesitation. We have seen that the economics of Malthus, whether in relation to the landlords, the employers, or the workmen, are by no means identical with the economics of Ricardo and his school, which have been the ruling and orthodox doctrine for the first half of the nineteenth century.