regulated by this lowest rate, which is consistent
with common humanity.
First, in almost every part of Great Britain
there is a distinction, even in the lowest species
of labour, between summer and winter
wages. Summer wages are always highest.
But, on account of the extraordinary expense
of fuel, the maintenance of a family is most
expensive in winter. Wages, therefore, being
highest when this expense is lowest, it seems
evident that they are not regulated by what
is necessary for this expense, but by the quantity
and supposed value of the work. A labourer,
it may be said, indeed, ought to save
part of his summer wages, in order to defray
his winter expense; and that, through the
whole year, they do not exceed what is necessary
to maintain his family through the whole
year. A slave, however, or one absolutely
dependent on us for immediate subsistence,
would not be treated in this manner. His
daily subsistence would be proportioned to his
daily necessities.
Secondly, the wages of labour do not, in
Great Britain, fluctuate with the price of provisions.
These vary everywhere from year to
year, frequently from month to month. But
in many places, the money price of labour remains
uniformly the same, sometimes for half
a century together. If, in these places, therefore,
the labouring poor can maintain their families
in dear years, they must be at their ease
in times of moderate plenty, and in affluence
in those of extraordinary cheapness. The high
price of provisions during these ten years past,
has not, in many parts of the kingdom, been
accompanied with any sensible rise in the money
price of labour. It has, indeed, in some;
owing, probably, more to the increase of the
demand for labour, than to that of the price
of provisions.
Thirdly, as the price of provisions varies
more from year to year than the wages of labour,
so, on the other hand, the wages of labour
vary more from place to place than the
price of provisions. The prices of bread and
butchers' meat are generally the same, or very
nearly the same, through the greater part of
the united kingdom. These, and most other
things which are sold by retail, the way in
which the labouring poor buy all things, are
generally fully as cheap, or cheaper, in great
towns than in the remoter parts of the country,
for reasons which I shall have occasion to
explain hereafter. But the wages of labour
in a great town and its neighbourhood, are
frequently a fourth or a fifth part, twenty or
five-and-twenty per cent. higher than at a few
miles distance. Eighteen pence a day may
be reckoned the common price of labour in
London and its neighborhood. At a few
miles distance, it falls to fourteen and fifteen
pence. Tenpence may be reckoned its price
in Edinburgh and its neighbourhood. At a
few miles distance, it falls to eightpence, the
usual price of common labour through the
greater part of the low country of Scotland,
where it varies a good deal less than in England.
Such a difference of prices, which, it
seems, is not always sufficient to transport a
man from one parish to another, would necessarily
occasion so great a transportation of the
most bulky commodities, not only from one
parish to another, but from one end of the kingdom,
almost from one end of the world to the
other, as would soon reduce them more nearly
to a level. After all that has been said of the
levity and inconstancy of human nature, it
appears evidently from experience, that man
is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to
be transported. If the labouring poor, therefore,
can maintain their families in those parts
of the kingdom where the price of labour is
lowest, they must be in affluence where it is
highest.
Fourthly, the variations in the price of labour
not only do not correspond, either in
place or time, with those in the price of provisions,
but they are frequently quite opposite.
Grain, the food of the common people, is
dearer in Scotland than in England, whence
Scotland receives almost every year very large
supplies. But English corn must be sold
dearer in Scotland, the country to which it is
brought, than in England, the country from
which it comes; and it proportion to its quality
it cannot be sold dearer in Scotland than
the Scotch corn that comes to the same market
in competition with it. The quality of
grain depends chiefly upon the quantity of
flour or meal which it yields at the mill; and,
in this respect, English grain is so much superior
to the Scotch, that though often dearer
in appearance, or in proportion to the measure
of its bulk, it is generally cheaper in reality,
or in proportion to its quality, or even to the
measure of its weight. The price of labour,
on the contrary, is dearer in England than in
Scotland. If the labouring poor, therefore,
can maintain their families in the one part of
the united kingdom, they must be in affluence
in the other. Oatmeal, indeed, supplies the
common people in Scotland with the greatest
and the best part of their food, which is, in
general, much inferior to that of their neighbours
of the same rank in England. This
difference, however, in the mode of their subsistence,
is not the cause, but the effect, of
the difference in their wages; though, by a
strange misapprehension, I have frequently
heard it represented as the cause. It is not
because one man keeps a coach, while his
neighbour walks a-foot, that one is rich,
and the other poor; but because the one is
rich, he keeps a coach, and because the other
is poor, he walks a-foot.
During the course of the last century, taking
one year with another, grain was dearer
in both parts of the united kingdom than during
that of the present. This is a matter of