for it is not universally so, his day-wages are somewhat lower. His employment, though it depends much, does not depend so entirely upon the occasional calls of his customers; and it is not liable to be interrupted by the weather.

"When the trades which generally afford constant employment happen in a particular place not to do so, the wages of the workmen always rise a good deal above their ordinary proportion to those of common labour. In London almost all journeymen artificers are liable to be called upon and dismissed by their master from day to day, and from week to week, in the same manner as day-labourers in other places. The lowest order of artificers, journeymen tailors, accordingly, earn there half-a-crown a day, though eighteenpence may be reckoned the wages of common labour. In small towns and country villages the wages of journeymen tailors frequently scarce equal those of common labour; but in London they are often many weeks without employment, particularly during the summer.

"When the inconstancy of employment is combined with the hardship, disagreeableness, and dirtiness of the work, it sometimes raises the wages of the most common labourer above those of the most skilful artificers. A collier working by the piece is supposed, at Newcastle, to earn commonly about double, and in many parts of Scotland about three times the wages of common labour. His high wages arise altogether from the hardship, disagreeableness, and dirtiness of his work. His employment may, upon most occasions, be as constant as he pleases. The coal-heavers in London exercise a trade which in hardship, dirtiness, and disagreeableness, almost equals that of colliers; and, from the unavoidable irregularity in the arrivals of coal-ships, the employment of the greater part of them is necessarily very inconstant. If colliers, therefore, commonly earn double and triple the wages of common labour, it ought not to seem unreasonable that coal-heavers should sometimes earn four and five times those wages. In the inquiry made into their condition a few years ago, it was found that at the rate at which they were then paid, they

could earn from six to ten shillings a day. Six shillings are about four times the wages of common labour in London, and in every particular trade the lowest common earnings may always be considered as those of the far greater number. How extravagant soever those earnings may appear, if they were more than sufficient to compensate all the disagreeable circumstances of the business, there would soon be so great a number of competitors as, in a trade which has no exclusive privilege, would quickly reduce them to a lower rate.

"Fourthly, The wages of labour vary according to the small or great trust which must be reposed in the workmen.

"The wages of goldsmiths and jewellers are everywhere superior to those of many other workmen, not only of equal but of much superior ingenuity, on account of the precious materials with which they are intrusted.

"We trust our health to the physician; our fortune, and sometimes our life and reputation, to the lawyer and attorney. Such confidence could not safely be reposed in people of a very mean or low condition. Their reward must be such, therefore, as may give them that rank in the society which so important a trust requires. The long time and the great expense which must be laid out in their education, when combined with this circumstance, necessarily enhance still further the price of their labour.

"Fifthly, The wages of labour in different employments vary according to the probability or improbability of success in them.

"The probability that any particular person shall ever be qualified for the employment to which he is educated is very different in different occupations. In the greater part of mechanic trades success is almost certain, but very uncertain in the liberal professions. Put your son apprentice to a shoemaker, there is little doubt of his learning to make a pair of shoes; but send him to study the law, it is at least twenty to one if ever he makes such proficiency as will enable him to live by the business. In a perfectly fair lottery, those who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those who

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draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty. The counsellor-atlaw, who, perhaps, at near forty years of age, begins to make something by his profession, ought to receive the retribution, not only of his own so tedious and expensive education, but of that of more than twenty others who are never likely to make any thing by it. How extravagant soever the fees of counsellors-at-law may sometimes appear, their real retribution is never equal to this. Compute in any particular place what is likely to be annually gained, and what is likely to be annually spent, by all the different workmen in any common trade, such as that of shoemakers or weavers, and you will find that the former sum will generally exceed the latter. But make the same computation with regard to all the counsellors and students of law, in all the different inns of court, and you will find that their annual gains bear but a very small proportion to their annual expense, even though you rate the former as high and the latter as low as can well be done. The lottery of the law, therefore, is very far from being a perfectly fair lottery; and that, as well as many other liberal and honourable professions, is, in point of pecuniary gain, evidently under-recompensed.

"Those professions keep their level; however, with other occupations, and, notwithstanding these discouragements, all the most generous and liberal spirits are eager to crowd into them. Two different causes contribute to recommend them: first, the desire of the reputation which attends upon superior excellence in any of them; and, secondly, the natural confidence which every man has, more or less, not only in his own abilities, but in his own good fortune.

"To excel in any profession, in which but few arrive at mediocrity, is the most decisive mark of what is called genius or superior talents. The public admiration which attends upon such distinguished abilities makes always a part of their reward; a greater or smaller in proportion as it is higher or lower in degree. It makes a considerable part of that re

ward in the profession of physic; a still greater, perhaps, in that of law; in poetry and philosophy it makes almost the whole."*

It thus appears that there is, in all the different species or employments of labour, a very great variety and difference of circumstances, or of advantages and disadvantages attending them, which necessarily give occasion to a correspondent variety and difference of pecuniary wages. And when we contemplate the wide extent of this variety, and of this difference of wages, from the highest to the lowest, first, in the provinces of unproductive labour, from the king, the minister of state, and the judge upon the bench, down to the common beadle or sheriff-officer,—from the military chief, or general, down to the common soldier, -and from the divine, the lawyer, and the physician, to the menial servant; and, secondly, in the provinces of productive labour, from the general merchant to the common sailors in his ships and porters in his warehouses,-from the master manufacturer to his journeymen or workmen,—and from the extensive farmer to his ploughmen and other common labourers,—it must appear indeed a most monstrous and unaccountable hallucination that could lead any per

* Wealth of Nations, book i. chap. 10. By looking into the "Wealth of Nations," and into the chapter just mentioned, whence the above extracts are taken, it will be seen that they are there intermingled with others, on the profit of stock, already quoted in the first section of the seventh chapter of this book, on that subject. In that place it was shown that there is an error in supposing, as Dr Smith has done, that profit is affected by any of the five circumstances which he describes so justly as affecting wages, and that he was led into that error by another, of which it was there shown also he was himself perfectly aware, namely, that he had not perfectly discriminated between profit and wages.

son in his senses to attempt, as one of Mr Ricardo's disciples has done, to demonstrate the "equality of wages !"* or to treat of them, as has been done by Mr Ricardo himself, as if they were limited to what would command but the lowest necessaries of life, and as if they represented a fixed and unvarying quantity!

Yet, however various and different the wages of labour really are in different employments, they are still regulated in a certain degree in all of them by the same principles: immediately, by the number of applicants or of hands, candidates or competitors in each, compared with the extent of the employment; and more remotely, by the habits and modes of life or subsistence common to each; and consequently by those external and other circumstances which determine, control, and generate the general character and habits of every class and order of the people.

What those external circumstances are which chiefly determine, control, and generate the general character, and habits, and condition of the people, I have already indicated pretty largely and unequivocally;† but I must still endeavour somewhat farther to illustrate my position, and to show more fully than has yet been done the connexion between wages and the habits and modes of subsistence of the labourers, and the connexion of those habits and modes of subsistence, especially in reference to the lower classes of labourers, with the character of the laws and government under which they live.

"Equality of Wages" is the running title of one of the chapters of Macculloch's Principles of Political Economy, at the head of which we read at length, Equality of Wages in all the different Departments of Industry!"

+ See chapter 10 of book i.