The profits of stock vary with the price of the commodities in which it is employed.As the price of any commodity rises above the ordinary or average rate, the profits of at least some part of the stock that is employed in bringing it to market, rise above their proper level, and as it falls they sink below it.All commodities are more or less liable to variations of price, but some are much more so than others.In all commodities which are produced by human industry, the quantity of industry annually employed is necessarily regulated by the annual demand, in such a manner that the average annual produce may, as nearly as possible, be equal to the average annual consumption.In some employments, it has already been observed, the same quantity of industry will always produce the same, or very nearly the same quantity of commodities.In the linen or woollen manufactures, for example, the same number of hands will annually work up very nearly the same quantity of linen and woollen cloth.The variations in the market price of such commodities, therefore, can arise only from some accidental variation in the demand.Apublic mourning raises the price of black cloth.But as the demand for most sorts of plain linen and woollen cloth is pretty uniform, so is likewise the price.But there are other employments in which the same quantity of industry will not always produce the same quantity of commodities.The same quantity of industry, for example, will, in different years, produce very different quantities of corn, wine, hops, sugar, tobacco, etc.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 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 as 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 Cotters or Cottagers, though they were more frequent some years ago than they are now.They are a sort of outservants of the landlords and farmers.The usual reward which they receive from their masters 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 sixteenpence 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 recompense to anybody, 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 season.The daily or weekly recompense 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 recompense, 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 pleasures in representing both as wonderfully low.
The produce of such labour comes frequently cheaper to market than would otherwise 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 whole livelihood by either of those trades.In most parts of Scotland she is a good spinner who can earn twentypence a week.