'Just imagine', he goes on to lecture v. Kirchmann, 'these shares to be so small as to ensure only a bare subsistence for those who are entitled to them. As long as you establish them as representing a proportion of the national product, you will have a constant "vessel for value" which can absorb ever increasing contents, and an ever increasing prosperity of the working classes as well.... And now imagine on the contrary as large a share for the working classes as you please, and let it become an ever smaller fraction of the national product that grows with increasing productivity. Then, provided it is not reduced to the present pittance, this share will still protect the workers from undue privations since the amount of products it represents will still be considerably greater than it is to-day. Once this share begins to decline, however, there will be spreading discontent, culminating in a commercial crisis for which the capitalists are not to blame inasmuch as they did no more than their duty in laying down the volume of production according to the given magnitude of these shares.' That is why the 'declining wage rate' is the real cause of crises. It can only be counteracted by legal measures to ensure that the workers' share represents a stable and unchanging rate of the national product. This grotesque notion takes some understanding if we are to do justice to its economic implications. FOOTNOTES: [237] To v. Kirchmann, in 1880. [238] Dr. Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, _Schriften_ (Berlin, 1899), vol. iii, pp. 172-4, 184. [239] Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 104 f. [240] Op. cit., vol. i, p. 99. [241] Ibid., p. 173. [242] Ibid., p. 176. [243] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 65. [244] _Schriften_, vol. i, pp. 182-4. [245] Ibid., pp. 182-4. [246] Ibid., p. 72. [247] _Schriften_, vol. iii, pp. 110-11. [248] Ibid., p. 108. [249] Op. cit., vol. i, p. 62. [250] _Schriften_, vol. iv, p. 226. [251] In _Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_, part ii, n. 1. [252] In _On Commercial Crises and the Mortgage Problem of the Landowners_, quoted above (op. cit., vol. iii, p. 186).