The conclusions reached in the preceding chapters, if not of universal application, are at least of very wide application. They hold good of any community which has got beyond the most primitive stages in the arts, and in which the development of the arts has brought any complicated series of productive acts. They would hold good of a socialist community as well as of one maintaining the régime of private property.

The fact that present labor gets its substantial reward from a product made chiefly by past labor was the basis of the reasoning of the classic economists. The products of the past which served to support and remunerate laborers they called capital. They inferred — indeed, assumed as a thing so obvious as hardly to need inference — that wages were paid from capital. In the second part of the present volume we shall have occasion to note how briefly and inadequately they presented this cardinal proposition.

The subject of the present volume is the wages-fund doctrine and the immediate relation of capital to wages. To discuss adequately this topic it will not be necessary to consider every part of the theory of wages or of capital; yet some parts of the economic field will need to be traversed that may seem at first sight to lie beyond the limits chosen. More particularly, it will be necessary to begin with some description at large of the process of production, and of the manner in which the exertions of men yield them an enjoyable result.