An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

case, naturally multiply beyond their employment. There would be a constant

scarcity of employment, and the labourers would be obliged to bid against

one another in order to get it. If in such a country the wages off 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 workhouses 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 neighbourhood 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 another 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 he 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 maybe 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 winch it is possible to do this. There are many

plain symptoms, that the wages of labour are nowhere in this country

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 neighbourhood. 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 in 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 the 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