We begin presently to perceive that there are two faces to that word “worth”; that it represents sometimes the price to the buyer and sometimes the cost to the worker. The price to the buyer—the “worth” of the work in the answer quoted above—is neither more nor less than its market price, or, in other words, the price brought about by the balance of competition between those who want to buy labour and those who want to sell it. This price is regulated solely by the numbers competing on either hand and by their greater or less degree of combined action. But the cost of work to the worker is the expenditure of energy which he has made upon it. Every hour’s work of a man or woman takes out of that man or that woman a certain fixed amount of strength, of energy,—in short, a certain amount of life. When we work, we spend, literally, something of our substance. To make up that expenditure, we must have both a certain amount of nourishment and a certain amount of rest. If our work is not paid at such a rate as to give us that, we lose something in every hour we work. We spend a little more life than is restored to us. Even if we are paid at a rate that enables us just to make up what we have spent, we have earned nothing—we have only had our outlay repaid to us. The purchaser who pays a worker just enough to make him as fit for work afterwards as before, has only paid the worker’s expenses; he has not yet begun to pay him for his work. The worker in such a case is precisely in the position of a capitalist who has lent money, and got it back, but has made no profit on its use. The wage of much labour in this and in other countries is on that scale. So accustomed, indeed, are we to this state of things that many of us think a worker quite well paid if he receives enough to keep him in good bodily condition. Yet the same people who hold this opinion in regard to that labour which is the sole capital of the worker, consider themselves to have made a very bad bargain if they so invest their pecuniary capital as to receive no interest upon it. It would be well if we should bear in mind that the worker who receives no more than enough to make up the strength expended, is in exactly that financial position. But there is a financial stage lower than this: the stage of the worker who not only gets no interest upon his capital, but does not get even back the whole of his capital. That labour is so often yielded for less than its cost is one reason why a working man’s expectation of life is considerably less than that of a professional man; or, to put it in other words, why the dock labourer and the omnibus conductor die younger than the lawyer and the clergyman.