186 CAPITAL— THE MOTHER OF LABOUR. it 



stowed on raw material, for the purpose of giving 

 rise to a certain product, confers some additional 

 value on that material in the estimation of those 

 who are engaged in manufacturing that product, 

 the ratio of that accumulated value, at any stage 

 of the process, to the value of the finished product 

 is extremely inconstant, and often small; while, 

 to other persons, the value of the unfinished pro- 

 duct may be nothing, or even a minus quantity. 

 A house-timber merchant, for example, might 

 consider that wood which had been worked into 

 the ribs of a ship w^as spoiled — that is, had less 

 value than it had as a log. 



According to " Progress and Poverty," there 

 was, really, no advance of capital while the great 

 St. Gothard tunnel was cut. Suppose that, as the 

 Swiss and the Italian halves of the tunnel ap- 

 proached to within half a kilometre, that half- 

 kilometre had turned out to be composed of prac- 

 tically impenetrable rock — would anybody have 

 given a centime for the unfinished tunnel? And 

 if not, how comes it that " the creation of value 

 does not depend on the finishing of the product " ? 



I think it may not be too much to say that, of 

 all the political delusions which are current in this 

 queer world, the very stupidest are those which 

 assume that labour and capital are necessarily an- 

 tagonistic; that all capital is produced by labour 

 and therefore, by natural right, is the property of 



