XXIV. IN MEMORIAM. 



kind are swallowed up by the outlay of capital ; "Thekindness which 

 is done by capital when it affords employment to people from 

 whom, by a monopoly, it has taken their little businesses, is such 

 as one might do to a cock by adorning his head with a plume 

 made of feathers pulled out of his own tail." And as regards 

 those who have sunk from being (though perhaps small ones) 

 masters to mere workers, he says their wages are doubtless better 

 than nothing, but " yet it may have been quite as well for them 

 if the profit on their toil had been taken by themselves instead 

 of the great capitalist, and if they had taken their money on their 

 own desk rather than on the Saturday pay-table." This, of 

 course, at once opens up the whole question of the rights of 

 labour to share in the profits of their work ; and this is the bone 

 of contention still. Mi\ BARNES also has a pertinent sentence 

 upon a dogma which one frequently now hears, and sees in print, as 

 addressed to our " masters," the agricultural labourers, and with 

 a view to content them with their lot. It refers to the " identity 

 of interest between the employer and the labourer," or, what is the 

 same, between " capital and labour." Mr. BARNES remarks (p. 70) 

 " It is often said that the interests of capital and labour are 

 identical, and so in truth they are as long as they are kept so by 

 the law of Christian kindness ; but if the truth or the broad 

 form of it be misunderstood by the hand-hiring capital, it does 

 not follow that the wealth of the capitalist and workman are 

 identical." Mr. BARNES here appeals to a higher law than the 

 mere law of the land, or the market pi-ice, as a true and 

 potent factor in all questions between labour and capital. The 

 capitalist may ensconce himself behind the law of the land, 

 he may seek to justify himself by the " market price of labour," 

 but no law, in Mr. BARNES' opinion, can ever enforce any true 

 identity of interest between capital and labour, but that one of 

 which he speaks in the passage quoted, " The law of Christian kind- 

 ness," which, when it works so as to discover that the market 

 price is not always the just, although it may be the legal measure 

 of labour's value, will also operate so as to accord a share of the 



