ABSTRACT
Socialists may say, if they like, that the wage-earner ought in justice to get, not only the full value of his own product; but they, like everybody else, will maintain that the typical wage-earner should at all events get as much. Whenever the distribution of material things is discussed—whether in a Papal Encyclical or on the platform of a social congress—the question of wages is that towards which discussion gravitates. The wage-earner would, in that case, by submitting his technical efforts to the control of another person, however superior to himself, get less for his own consumption than he once got, or might get, by working as his own master. In the first place, even if, in a strictly material sense, the independent worker, by being converted into a wage-earner, lost nothing, he at all events, in a material sense, gains nothing; and in the second place he would lose something which, though not material, is appreciable none the less.
