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 which 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 butcher's 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.Eighteenpence 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 fifteenpence.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 a 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.