Author’s Note:

This was recognized in common speech in California, where the placer miners styled their earnings their “wages,” and spoke of making high wages or low wages according to the amount of gold taken out.

Author’s Note:

We are speaking of labor expended in production, to which it is best for the sake of simplicity to confine the inquiry. Any question which may arise in the reader’s mind as to wages for unproductive services had best therefore be deferred.

Author’s Note:

For instance McCulloch (Note VI to “Wealth of Nations”) says: “That portion of the capital or wealth of a country which the employers of labor intend to or are willing to pay out in the purchase of labor, may be much larger at one time than another. But whatever may be its absolute magnitude, it obviously forms the only source from which any portion of the wages of labor can be derived. No other fund is in existence from which the laborer, as such, can draw a single shilling. And hence it follows that the average rate of wages, or the share of the national capital appropriated to the employment of labor falling, at an average, to each laborer, must entirely depend on its amount as compared with the number of those amongst whom it has to be divided.” Similar citations might be made from all the standard economists.

Author’s Note:

Times Of commercial panic are marked by high rates of discount, but this is evidently not a high rate of interest, properly so called, but a but rate of insurance against risk.

Author’s Note:

This seems to me true of Mr. Thornton’s objections, for while he denies the existence of a predetermined wage fund, consisting of a portion of capital set apart for the purchase of labor, he yet holds (which is the essential thing) that wages are drawn from capital, and that increase or decrease of capital is increase or decrease of the fund available for the payment of wages. The most vital attack upon the wage fund doctrine of which I know is that of Professor Francis A. Walker (“The Wages Question”, New York, 1876), yet he admits that wages are in large part advanced from capital – which, so far as it goes, is all that the stanchest supporter of the wage fund theory could claim while he fully accepts the Malthusian theory. Thus his practical conclusions in nowise differ from those reached by expounders of the current theory.

Author’s Footnote:

It is true that the poorest may now in certain ways enjoy what the richest a century ago could not have commanded, but this does not show improvement of condition so long as the ability to obtain the necessaries of life is not increased. The beggar in a great city may enjoy many things from which the backwoods farmer is debarred, but that does not prove the condition of the city beggar better than that of the independent farmer.

Sticking with the song’s dark, biblical motif, ravens have, along with crows, appeared more times and across greater expanses of Earth, history, and culture than any other bird in existence. They are mentioned in Isaiah 34:11 to depict the desolation of a desert which was once filled with life, but was then filled with death and in Leviticus 11:13 as an abomination that must not be eaten.

However, the very first biblical mention of ravens paints them in a much more positive light:

And he sent forth a [white] raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.

— Genesis 8:7

To those familiar with the story of Noah and the Great Flood, this is the bird Noah sent out after the 40 days and 40 nights of rain had subsided to gauge whether or not the flood waters had receded enough to leave the ark.

This consequently brings up the dichotomy of good versus evil as well as that of black versus white.