John Ball's famous rhyme condensed the scorn for the nobles, the longing for just rule, and the resentment at oppression, of the peasants of that time and of all times:-- "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" A hundred years after the Black Death the wages of a common English laborer--we have the highest authority for the statement--commanded twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could have been obtained for the wages paid under Edward III. 3. Having now seen fully the varied action of Supply and Demand upon the Value of personal services in their three kinds, we come at length to the most important general point in this chapter, namely, that in the second class of Services, those purchased in connection with the use of _Capital_, WAGES ARE ALL THE TIME ENLARGING RELATIVELY TO PROFITS. We have seen clearly already, that Cost of Labor and Cost of Capital are the only onerous elements in the cost of Commodities; because, while Natural Agents are all the time assisting and assisting more and more effectively in such production, they work without weariness or decay and without fee or reward. The reward of laborers is Wages, and the reward of capitalists is Profits; and we are now to demonstrate, that the part of their joint products falling to laborers as wages is all the while increasing as compared with the remaining part falling to capitalists as profits. This truth is of the deepest significance, and of the most cheering character; because men are more important in the universe than things; and because the number of men who sell their services as laborers is vastly greater than the number of men who sell their services as capitalists. It is another indisputable and exhilarating truth for the masses of mankind, that the Value of each item or article of those products created by the joint action of laborers and capitalists is ever becoming less and less as measured by any relatively fixed standard as Money; so that, while wages as thus measured becomes a larger and larger aggregate as compared with the aggregate of profits, and is shared of course by a much larger number of people, those commodities looked at as a collection of items for which the wages of these many is usually expended for their own comforts, are becoming all the time cheaper and cheaper to everybody, owing to the ever-enlarging and wholly gratuitous action of natural forces.