The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this —
 that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker,
 but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative
 surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of
 labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within
 limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social
 dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite,
 is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug political
 economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of
 free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners
 of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the
 commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder.
 The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country,
 because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the
 labour-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour
 falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital,
 thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular
 reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with
 impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the 
 production of wage-labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation 
 of capital? The wage-worker of to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant, or 
 artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour-market, but not into 
 the workhouse. This constant transformation of the wage-labourers into independent producers, who work for
 themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the
 capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions
 of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer
 remain indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with
 the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious
 capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures
 so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage labour,
 he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply
 of labour is always not only small but uncertain.” [13]
 “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the labourer be large,
 the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist....
 Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses
 of wealth.” [14] The labourers most distinctly decline 
 to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part
 of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import
 from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease...
 to be labourers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not
 competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.” [15]
 Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from
 Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world
 has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and
 of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies.
 On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in
 the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers
 — for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being
 dictated to by them.... In ancient civilised countries the labourer, though
 free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this
 dependence must be created by artificial means.” [16]