Though the wealth of a country should be very great, yet if it has been long stationary, we must not expect to find the wages of labour very high in it.The funds destined for the payment of wages, the revenue and stock of its inhabitants, may be of the greatest extent; but if they have continued for several centuries of the same, or very nearly of the same extent, the number of labourers employed every year could easily supply, and even more than supply, the number wanted the following year.There could seldom be any scarcity of hands, nor could the masters be obliged to bid against one another in order to get them.The hands, on the contrary, would, in this 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 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 this 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 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 service, 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 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.