§ 9. OVER-PRODUCTION AND WAGES--With all this, too, we hear cries of over-production, a phrase which economically is meaningless, more especially at a time when a very large number of people in the civilized world are daily on the verge of starvation, when the paupers of every civilized country are numbered by thousands, and plenty of people who never complain have not enough clothes to wear and not enough food to eat. Wages are certainly better than they were fifty years ago, but no one who knows {221} the facts of the case will deny that for the average workman--I am not speaking of skilled artisans and the _élite_ of the working classes--it is practically impossible to save anything out of his wages against old age or sickness. It is not the business of a historian to vituperate any particular class, but he may justly point out the mistakes to which classes have as a matter of history been liable. And the great mistake of the capitalist class in modern times has been to pay too little wages.[63] It is an old agricultural saying--I believe of Arthur Young’s--that one cannot pay too much for good land, or too little for bad land. The same remark applies to labour. Capitalist employers rarely make the mistake of paying too much for bad labour, but they have constantly, as a matter of history, committed the worse error of paying too little for good labour. At the beginning of this century, as I have shown, the coming of the capitalist and of the capitalist factory system, beneficial as it was ultimately to England, was followed by a time of unprecedented misery and poverty for those whom they employed. The day of the capitalist has come, and he has made full use of it. The day of the labourer will come when he has the wisdom, and, we may add, the self-denial, necessary for a right use of his opportunities. [63. This is now not so true as it was some time ago.]