The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product,
 is limited in this way, that less labour must be expended in producing
 the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery, For
 the capitalist, however, this use is still more limited. Instead of paying
 for the labour, he only pays the value of the labour-power employed; therefore,
 the limit to his using a machine is fixed by the difference between the
 value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it.
 Since the division of the day’s work into necessary and surplus-labour
 differs in different countries, and even in the same country at different
 periods, or in different branches of industry; and further, since the actual
 wage of the labourer at one time sinks below the value of his labour-power,
 at another rises above it, it is possible for the difference between the
 price of the machinery and the 371price of the labour-power replaced
 by that machinery to vary very much, although the difference between the
 quantity of labour requisite to produce the machine and the total quantity
 replaced by it, remain constant. [33] But it is the
 former difference alone that determines the cost, to the capitalist, of
 producing a commodity, and, through the pressure of competition, influences
 his action. Hence the invention now-a-days of machines in England that
 are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth
 centuries, machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland,
 and just as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited
 in England alone. In the older countries, machinery, when employed in some
 branches of industry, creates such a redundancy of labour in other branches
 that in these latter the fall of wages below the value of labour-power
 impedes the use of machinery, and, from the standpoint of the capitalist,
 whose profit comes, not from a diminution of the labour employed, but of
 the labour paid for, renders that use superfluous and often impossible.
 In some branches of the woollen manufacture in England the employment of
 children has during recent years been considerably diminished, and in some
 cases has been entirely abolished. Why? Because the Factory Acts made two
 sets of children necessary, one working six hours, the other four, or each
 working five hours. But the parents refused to sell the “half-timers” cheaper
 than the “full-timers.” Hence the substitution of machinery for the “half-timers.” [34] Before the labour of women and of children under 10 years of age was forbidden in mines, capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code, and especially by their ledgers, that it was only after the passing of the Act that they had recourse to machinery. The Yankees
 have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of
 it, because the “wretch” [35] who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour, that machinery 372would
 increase the cost of production to the capitalist. [36] In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, [37] because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required
 to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation.
 Hence nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power
 for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.