give for nine. In case the labourers by increase in their efficiency
are able to get higher wages, the choice will (in general) lie with
them how much of the increase they take in increased money wages, how
much they take in shortened hours of labour. We thus see how, in an
uncivilised community, owing to the inefficiency of their labour,
their whole time and energies are expended on their hunting, or
otherwise providing bare subsistence. The greater skill of our
civilised labourers, working with machines provided by our science,
and profiting by our fixed capital (as our railway tunnels and
embankments), is vastly more efficient: it ensures the labourers a
certainty and regularity of food which the savage does not enjoy, and
provides him a certain margin of leisure beyond what the inefficient
savage labourer can count upon; it also provides the whole surplus
production out of which the intellectual and leisure classes are
supported.

It is to be noted that an increase of efficiency in any industry (and
very largely in the case of industries producing generally essential
utilities) raises real wages in all other industries, and this,
whether the particular trade gains (as we have seen it nearly always
do) or loses, as is conceivable, though rarely occurring. Thus, if
the introduction of a boot-sewing machine lowers the price of boots
50 per cent, this can have no effect in lowering the money wages of
farm labourers; and, as a matter of fact, the fall in cost of boots
has sensibly improved the position of farm labourers. In the same way
the superior efficiency of carriers by railway over the old road
carriers has diminished the cost of coal and all articles (the bulky
ones most sensibly) in all parts of England. There thus arises the
instructive result that handicrafts in which there has been no
improvement in the last forty years have obtained a rise of real