Progress and Poverty · Book I · Chapter 1 4 (2/2)

The series of exchanges which unite production and consumption may be likened to a curved pipe filled with water. If a quantity of water is poured in at one end, a like quantity is released at the other. It is not identically the same water, but is its equivalent. And so they who do the work of production put in as they take out⁠—they receive in subsistence and wages but the produce of their labor.