John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

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CAIRNES ON MILL S POLITICAL ECONOMY. 199
outlook which, in the main,
it discloses for the human race. It seems to
have been Ricardo s deliberate opinion that a substantial improvement in
the condition of the mass of mankind was impossible. He considered it as
the normal state of things that wages should be at the minimum requisite
to support the labourer in physical health and strength, and to enable him
to bring up a family large enough to supply the wants of the labour
market. A temporary improvement, indeed, as the consequence of ex
panding commerce and growing capital, he saw that there might be ; but
he held that the force of the principle of population was always powerful
enough so to augment the supply of labour as to bring wages ever again
to the minimum point. So completely had this belief become a fixed
idea in Ricardo s mind, that he confidently drew from it the consequence
that in no case could taxation fall on the labourer, since living, as a
normal state ot things, on the lowest possible stipend adequate to maintain
him and his family he would inevitably, he argued, transfer the burden
to his employer, and a tax, nominally on wages, would, in the result,
become invariably a tax upon profits. On this point Mill s doctrine leads
to conclusions directly opposed to Ricardo s, and to those of most preceding
economists. And it will illustrate his position as a thinker, in relation to
them, if we note how this result was obtained. Mill neither denied the
premises nor disputed the logic of Ricardo s argument he ; accepted both ;
and in particular he recognized fully the force of the principle of popula
tion ; but he took account of a further premiss which Ricardo had over
* moral
looked, and which, duly weighed, led to a reversal of Ricardo s conclusion.
The minimum of wages, even such as it exists in the case of the worst paid
labourer, is not the very least sum that human nature can subsist upon ; it
is something more than this ; in the case of all above the worst paid class
it is decidedly more. The minimum is, in truth, not a physical, but a
minimum, and, as such, is capable of being altered with the changes
in the moral character of those whom it affects. In a word, each class has
a certain standard of comfort below which it will not consent to live, or, at
least, to multiply a standard, however, not fixed, but liable to modifica
tion with the changing circumstances of society, and which in the case of a
progressive community is, in point of fact, constantly rising, as moral and
intellectual influences are brought more and more effectually to bear on the
masses of the people. This was the new premiss brought by Mill to the
elucidation of the wages question, and it sufficed to change the entire
aspect of human life regarded from the point of view of Political Economy.
The practical deductions made from it were set forth in the celebrated
chapter on "The Future of the Industrial Classes" a chapter which, it
is no exaggeration to say, places a gulf between Mill and all who preceded
him, and opens an entirely new vista to economic speculation.