The rates of interest actually paid in business vary very much, from one or two per cent. up to fifty per cent. or more. When the rate is above five or six per cent., it will be to some extent not true interest, but compensation for the risk of losing the capital altogether. To learn the true average rate of interest, we must inquire what is paid for money lent to those who are sure to pay it back, and who give property in pledge, so that there may be no doubt about the matter. It seems probable that the true average rate of interest in England is at present about four per cent., but it varies in different countries, being lower in England and Holland than anywhere else. In the United States it is probably six or seven per cent. The most important fact about #interest# is that #it is the same in one business as in another#. The rates of profit differ very much, it is true, but this is because the labour of superintendence is different, or because there is greater risk in one trade than another. But the true interest is the same, because capital, being lent in the form of money, can be lent to one trade just as easily as to another. There is nothing in circulating capital which fits it for one trade more than another: accordingly it will be lent to that trade which offers ever so little more interest than other trades. Thus #there is a constant tendency to the equality of interest in all branches of industry#. CHAPTER VII. WAGES. #43. Money Wages and Real Wages.# Wages, as we have already learnt, are the payments received by a labourer in return for his labour. It does not matter whether these payments are received daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. A day gardener is, perhaps, paid every evening; an artisan is usually paid on Saturday or Friday night, or sometimes fortnightly; clerks receive their salaries monthly; managers, officers, secretaries, and others, are paid quarterly, or sometimes half-yearly. When the wages are paid monthly, or at longer intervals, they are generally called #salary# (Latin, _salarium_, money given to Roman soldiers for salt); but if the salary is paid for labour and nothing else, it is exactly the same in nature as wages.