would be obliged to bid against one another
in order to get it. If in such a country the
wages of labour had ever been more than sufficient
to maintain the labourer, and to enable
him to bring up a family, the competition of
the labourers and the interest of the masters
would soon reduce them to the lowest rate
which is consistent with common humanity.
China has been long one of the richest, that
is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated,
most industrious, and most populous, countries
in the world. It seems, however, to have
been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited
it more than five hundred years ago, describes
its cultivation, industry, and populousness,
almost in the same terms in which they
are described by travellers in the present
times. It had, perhaps, even long before his
time, acquired that full complement of riches
which the nature of its laws and institutions
permits it to acquire. The accounts of all
travellers, inconsistent in many other respects,
agree in the low wages of labour, and in the
difficulty which a labourer finds in bringing
up a family in China. If by digging the
ground a whole day he can get what will purchase
a small quantity of rice in the evening,
he is contented. The condition of artificers
is, if possible, still worse. Instead of waiting
indolently in their work-houses for the calls
of their customers, as in Europe, they are
continually running about the streets with the
tools of their respective trades, offering their
services, and, as it were, begging employment.
The poverty of the lower ranks of people in
China far surpasses that of the most beggarly
nations in Europe. In the neighborhood of
Canton, many hundred, it is commonly
said, many thousand families have no habitation
on the land, but live constantly in little
fishing-boats upon the rivers and canals.
The subsistence which they find there is so
scanty, that they are eager to fish up the nastiest
garbage thrown overboard from any European
ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a
dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid
and stinking, is as welcome to them as
the most wholesome food to the people of
other countries. Marriage is encouraged in
China, not by the profitableness of children,
but by the liberty of destroying them. In
all great towns, several are every night exposed
in the street, or drowned like puppies in
the water. The performance of this horrid
office is even said to be the avowed business
by which some people earn their subsistence.
China, however, though it may, perhaps,
stand still, does not seem to go backwards.
Its towns are nowhere deserted by their inhabitants.
The lands which had once been cultivated,
are nowhere neglected. The same,
or very nearly the same, annual labour, must,
therefore, continue to be performed, and the
funds destined for maintaining it must not,
consequently, be sensibly diminished. The
lowest class of labourers, therefore, notwithstanding
their scanty subsistence, must some
way or other make shift to continue their
race so far as to keep up their usual numbers.
But it would be otherwise in a country
where the funds destined for the maintenance
of labour were sensibly decaying. Every year
the demand for servants and labourers would,
in all the different classes of employments, be
less than it had been the year before. Many
who had been bred in the superior classes, not
being able to find employment in their own
business, would be glad to seek it in the lowest.
The lowest class being not only overstocked
with its own workmen, but with the
overflowings of all the other classes, the competition
for employment would be so great in
it, as to reduce the wages of labour to the
most miserable and scanty subsistence of the
labourer. Many would not be able to find
employment even upon these hard terms, but
would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence,
either by begging, or by the perpetration,
perhaps, of the greatest enormities. Want,
famine, and mortality, would immediately prevail
in that class, and from thence extend themselves
to all the superior classes, till the number
of inhabitants in the country was reduced to
what could easily be maintained by the revenue
and stock which remained in it, and which
had escaped either the tyranny or calamity
which had destroyed the rest. This, perhaps,
is nearly the present state of Bengal, and of
some other of the English settlements in the
East Indies. In a fertile country, which had
before been much depopulated, where subsistence,
consequently, should not be very difficult,
and where, notwithstanding, three or
four hundred thousand people die of hunger
in one year, we may be assured that the funds
destined for the maintenance of the labouring
poor are fast decaying. The difference between
the genius of the British constitution,
which protects and governs North America,
and that of the mercantile company which oppresses
and domineers in the East Indies,
cannot, perhaps, be better illustrated than by
the different state of those countries.
The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as
it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural
symptom of increasing national wealth. The
scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on
the other hand, is the natural symptom that
things are at a stand, and their starving condition,
that they are going fast backwards.
In Great Britain, the wages of labour seem,
in the present times, to be evidently more
than what is precisely necessary to enable the
labourer to bring up a family. In order to
satisfy ourselves upon this point, it will not
be necessary to enter into any tedious or
doubtful calculation of what may be the lowest
sum upon which it is possible to do this.
There are many plain symptoms, that the
wages of labour are nowhere in this country