58 
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
described by Lassalle, following in the footsteps of Ricardo, 
Smith, and Turgot. In the first place, it is clearly true that 
the rate of wages cannot long remain below what is indis 
pensable to enable the labourers to live and rear children, 
otherwise their numbers would be rapidly diminished. It is 
not that we see them die of starvation, as in the famines of 
the Middle Ages, and even under Louis XIV. ; but, as Friederich 
Lange says, they die of the same causes as in ordinary times, 
only they disappear more rapidly.* Now it is a woman in 
childbirth who succumbs to the cold, and now an infant who 
perishes because the milk it takes is not sufficiently nourishing. 
Diseases become rapidly fatal, since they fasten on constitu 
tions already enfeebled ; and thus the mortality increases 
without being noticed. This is precisely what occurred during 
the siege of Paris. Scarcely any one literally died of hunger, 
because charity increased in proportion to the suffering, 
and yet the number of deaths considerably increased, while 
that of the births diminished. Prolonged industrial crises, 
and displacements or transformations in any particular 
trade, act in the same manner, when they bring about a 
reduction of wages. From this side, then, “ the iron law ” is 
a stern reality. 
But, on the other hand, is it true that wages can never rise 
above the minimum indispensable for existence, and that, in 
consequence, all the efforts of philanthropists to- better the 
condition of the great masses are, as Lassalle asserts, a delusion 
or a sham ? 
Mill was so convinced of the truth of this principle, that 
he did not wish agricultural labourers to be given even a strip 
of land where they might grow a few vegetables by working in 
their spare hours. The only result, he maintains, would be 
that, after his day’s work was over, the labourer would dig 
in his own garden in the evening, by moonlight, and on 
holidays, and that by thus obtaining some increase of food 
he would be able to sell his labour all the cheaper. Hence 
increase of work and lower wages would be the effect of a 
* Friederich-Albert Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage (The Labour Question), 
third edition, Winterthur, 1875, p. 164.