tobacco, &c. The price of such commodities,
therefore, varies not only with the variations
of demand, but with the much greater and
more frequent variations of quantity, and is
consequently extremely fluctuating; but the
profit of some of the dealers must necessarily
fluctuate with the price of the commodities.
The operations of the speculative merchant
are principally employed about such commodities.
He endeavours to buy them up when
he foresees that their price is likely to rise,
and to sell them when it is likely to fall.
Thirdly, this equality in the whole of the
advantages and disadvantages of the different
employments of labour and stock, can take
place only in such as are the sole or principal
employments of those who occupy them.
When a person derives his subsistence from
one employment, which does not occupy the
greater part of his time, in the intervals of his
leisure he is often willing to work at another
for less wages than would otherwise suit the
nature of the employment.
There still subsists, in many parts of Scotland,
a set of people called cottars or cottagers,
though they were more frequent some years
ago than they are now. They are a sort of
out-servants of the landlords and farmers.
The usual reward which they receive from
their master is a house, a small garden for
pot-herbs, as much grass as will feed a cow,
and, perhaps, an acre or two of bad arable
land. When their master has occasion for
their labour, he gives them, besides, two pecks
of oatmeal a-week, worth about sixteen pence
sterling. During a great part of the year, he
has little or no occasion for their labour, and
the cultivation of their own little possession is
not sufficient to occupy the time which is left
at their own disposal. When such occupiers
were more numerous than they are at present,
they are said to have been willing to give
their spare time for a very small recompence
to any body, and to have wrought for less
wages than other labourers. In ancient
times, they seem to have been common all
over Europe. In countries ill cultivated, and
worse inhabited, the greater part of landlords
and farmers could not otherwise provide themselves
with the extraordinary number of hands
which country labour requires at certain seasons.
The daily or weekly recompence which
such labourers occasionally received from their
masters, was evidently not the whole price of
their labour. Their small tenement made a
considerable part of it. This daily or weekly
recompence, however, seems to have been
considered as the whole of it, by many writers
who have collected the prices of labour and
provisions in ancient times, and who have
taken pleasure in representing both as wonderfully
low.
The produce of such labour comes frequently
cheaper to market than would otherwise be
suitable to its nature. Stockings, in many
parts of Scotland, are knit much cheaper than
they can anywhere be wrought upon the loom.
They are the work of servants and labourers,
who derive the principal part of their subsistence
from some other employment. More
than a thousand pair of Shetland stockings are
annually imported into Leith, of which the
price is from fivepence to sevenpence a pair.
At Lerwick, the small capital of the Shetland
islands, tenpence a-day, I have been assured,
is a common price of common labour. In the
same islands, they knit worsted stockings to
the value of a guinea a pair and upwards.
The spinning of linen yarn is carried on in
Scotland nearly in the same way as the knitting
of stockings, by servants, who are chiefly
hired for other purposes. They earn but a
very scanty subsistence, who endeavour to get
their livelihood by either of those trades. In
most parts of Scotland, she is a good spinner
who can earn twentypence a-week.
In opulent countries, the market is generally
so extensive, that any one trade is sufficient
to employ the whole labour and stock of
those who occupy it. Instances of people living
by one employment, and, at the same time,
deriving some little advantage from another,
occur chiefly in poor countries. The following
instance, however, of something of the
same kind, is to be found in the capital of a
very rich one. There is no city in Europe, I
believe, in which house-rent is dearer than in
London, and yet I know no capital in which
a furnished apartment can be hired so cheap.
Lodging is not only much cheaper in London
than in Paris; it is much cheaper than in
Edinburgh, of the same degree of goodness;
and, what may seem extraordinary, the dearness
of house-rent is the cause of the cheapness
of lodging. The dearness of house-rent
in London arises, not only from those causes
which render it dear in all great capitals, the
dearness of labour, the dearness of all the materials
of building, which must generally be
brought from a great distance, and, above all,
the dearness of ground-rent, every landlord
acting the part of a monopolist, and frequently
exacting a higher rent for a single acre of
bad land in a town, than can be had for a
hundred of the best in the country, but it
arises in part from the peculiar manners and
customs of the people, which oblige every
master of a family to hire a whole house from
top to bottom. A dwelling-house in England
means every thing that is contained under the
same roof. In France, Scotland, and many
other parts of Europe, it frequently means no
more than a single storey. A tradesman in
London is obliged to hire a whole house in
that part of the town where his customers
live. His shop is upon the ground floor, and
he and his family sleep in the garret; and he
endeavours to pay a part of his house-rent by
letting the two middle storeys to lodgers. He
expects to maintain his family by his trade,