When asked whether wages ought not to be left to find their own ‘level’, a Manchester silk-weaver replied that there was no similarity between ‘what is called capital and labour’:

Capital, I can make out to be nothing else but an accumulation of the products of labour…. Labour is always carried to market by those who have nothing else to keep or to sell, and who, therefore, must part with it immediately…. The labour which I… might perform this week, if I, in imitation of the capitalist, refuse to part with it… because an inadequate price is offered me for it, can I bottle it? can I lay it up in salt?… These two distinctions between the nature of labour and capital, (viz. that labour is always sold by the poor, and always bought by the rich, and that labour cannot by any possibility be stored, but must be every instant sold or every instant lost,) are sufficient to convince me that labour and capital can never with justice be subjected to the same laws…1