[Footnote 166-6: Thus, _Adam Smith_ divides "the funds destined for the payment of wages" into two kinds: the excess of employers' income over their own maintenance, and the excess of their capital over the demands of their own use of it. (Wealth of Nat, I, ch. 8.) _Senior_ considers it a self-evident principle, that the rate of wages depends on the size of the "fund for the maintenance of laborers compared with the number of laborers to be maintained." (Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages, 1830, Outlines, 153, ff.) But what determines the quota of the aggregate national wealth and national income that is to constitute this fund? _Carey_, Rate of Wages, 1835, has a very exhaustive commentary on _Senior_.] [Footnote 166-7: _Watts_, Statist. Journal, 1861, 500, asserts altogether too generally that an "increase of profit increases the future wages-fund, and consequently the demand for laborers;" and that therefore every new machine useful in manufactures must also be of use to the laboring class. The employer engaged in any enterprise who has grown richer, _can_ pay more wages, but whether he _will_ do it depends on other causes, and even his ability to do it, in the long run, on his customers. When _John Stuart Mill_, Principles, I, ch. 5, 9, says that only the capital which comes into the hands of labor before the completion of their work contributes to their support, it is as if he were to explain the phenomena of prices by demand and supply, and nothing else, denying the influence of the cost of production, of value in use, and of the deeper determining causes upon them. (_Supra_, § 107, note 1.) Compare _Roesler_, Z. Kritik der Lehre vom Arbeitslohn, 1861, 104 ff. In England, the superstition which to a great extent attached to the idea "wages-fund," was first questioned by _F. Longe_, Refutation of the Wages-Fund Theory of modern Political Economy, 1866. See also _Thornton_, On Labour, II, ch. 1. Even _John Stuart Mill_ dropped his earlier erroneous views on this subject. (Fortnightly Review, May and June, 1869.) Not, however, without exaggeration, as is proved by his well-known saying, that laborers needed capital but no capitalists. Still, even here, he tenaciously holds that a rise in wages which increases the price of some classes of commodities, must decrease the aggregate demand for commodities. But better paid workmen may now increase their demand for commodities to the same extent that the purchasers of labor who do not gain as much as before, or the consumers of the goods whose price has been enhanced diminish theirs. (_Brentano_, in Hildebrand's Jahrbb., 1871, 374.) Only, this increase need not affect the very commodities influenced by the decrease.]