An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith [e book reader pdf TXT] 📗
- Author: Adam Smith
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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
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