When an independent workman, such as a weaver or shoemaker, has got more stock than what is sufficient to purchase the materials of his own work, and to maintain himself till he can dispose of it, he naturally employs one or more journeymen with the surplus, in order to make a profit by their work.Increase this surplus, and he will naturally increase the number of his journeymen.
The demand for those who live by wages, therefore, necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue and stock of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it.The increase of revenue and stock is the increase of national wealth.
The demand for those who live by wages, therefore, naturally increases with the increase of national wealth, and cannot possibly increase without it.
It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour.It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest.England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America.The wages of labour, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England.In the province of New York, common labourers earn three shillings and sixpence currency, equal to two shillings sterling, a day; ship carpenters, ten shillings and sixpence currency, with a pint of rum worth sixpence sterling, equal in all to six shillings and sixpence sterling; house carpenters and bricklayers, eight shillings currency, equal to four shillings and sixpence sterling; journeymen tailors, five shillings currency, equal to about two shillings and tenpence sterling.These prices are all above the London price; and wages are said to be as high in the other colonies as in New York.The price of provisions is everywhere in North America much lower than in England.A dearth has never been known there.In the worst seasons they have always had a sufficiency for themselves, though less for exportation.If the money price of labour, therefore, be higher than it is anywhere in the mother country, its real price, the real command of the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it conveys to the labourer must be higher in a still greater proportion.
But though North America is not yet so rich as England, it is much more thriving, and advancing with much greater rapidity to the further acquisition of riches.The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.In Great Britain, and most other European countries, they are not supposed to double in less than five hundred years.In the British colonies in North America, it has been found that they double in twenty or five-and-twenty years.
Nor in the present times is this increase principally owing to the continual importation of new inhabitants, but to the great multiplication of the species.Those who live to old age, it is said, frequently see there from fifty to a hundred, and sometimes many more, descendants from their own body.Labour is there so well rewarded that a numerous family of children, instead of being a burthen, is a source of opulence and prosperity to the parents.The labour of each child, before it can leave their house, is computed to be worth a hundred pounds clear gain to them.A young widow with four or five young children, who, among the middling or inferior ranks of people in Europe, would have so little chance for a second husband, is there frequently courted as a sort of fortune.The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements to marriage.We cannot, therefore, wonder that the people in North America should generally marry very young.
Notwithstanding the great increase occasioned by such early marriages, there is a continual complaint of the scarcity of hands in North America.The demand for labourers, the funds destined for maintaining them, increase, it seems, still faster than they can find labourers to employ.