Some of Mr. Ricardo's followers, or more properly, of those who have
adopted in most particulars the views of political economy which his
genius was the first to open up, have given explanations of Mr.
Ricardo's doctrine to nearly the same effect as the above, but in rather
different terms. They have said that profits depend not on _absolute_,
but on _proportional_ wages: which they expounded to mean the proportion
which the labourers _en masse_ receive of the total produce of the
country.

It seems, however, to be rather an unusual and inconvenient use of
language to speak of anything as depending upon the wages of labour, and
then to explain that by wages of labour you do not mean the wages of an
individual labourer, but of all the labourers in the country
collectively. Mankind will never agree to call anything a rise of wages,
except a rise of the wages of individual labourers, and it is therefore
preferable to employ language tending to fix attention upon the wages of
the individual. The wages, however, on which profits are said to depend,
are undoubtedly _proportional_ wages, namely, the proportional wages of
one labourer: that is, the ratio between the wages of one labourer, and
(not the whole produce of the country, but) the amount of what one
labourer can produce; the amount of that portion of the collective
produce of the industry of the country, which may be considered as
corresponding to the labour of one single labourer. Proportional wages,
thus understood, may be concisely termed the cost of production of
wages; or, more concisely still, the cost of wages, meaning their cost
in the "original purchase money," labour.

We have now arrived at a distinct conception of Mr. Ricardo's theory of
profits in its most perfect state. And this theory we conceive to be the
basis of the true theory of profits. All that remains to do is to clear