ON THE PRICE OF LABOUR. 491 



will be found that I have designated London prices by mark- 

 ing certain figures with an asterisk. In the later period this 

 distinction almost disappears. The price of labour rises 

 indeed, but does not rise correspondingly in London and in 

 its vicinity. The wages of the country artisan are increased, 

 not indeed proportionately to the rise effected in the price of 

 the first necessaries of life; but the advantage of London 

 wages is no longer visible. The London artisan shares the 

 low estate of his country fellow- workman, and his condition is, 

 therefore, disproportionately deteriorated. All suffer, but he 

 suffers most. 



It is a sophism sometimes entertained by the working 

 classes, and always founded on very superficial and temporary 

 observation, but constantly urged by interested capitalists in 

 the prospect of higher profits, and by some landowners in the 

 prospect of higher rents, that an epoch of high prices is an 

 epoch of good wages, when high prices are the result of sudden 

 and increasing demand. High wages may be the consequent 

 of an exceptional demand for labour, though not invariably so, 

 as we may see from the history of wages during the last half 

 of the eighteenth, and the first forty years of the nineteenth 

 centuries. But the occasional exaltation of wages due to such 

 a demand and to deficient supply, is as nothing to the real 

 exaltation of wages which follows on an increase in their 

 purchasing power, in the steady growth of industries, and in 

 an ever extending market for produce. When high prices are 

 derived from scarcity only, or from a derangement of money 

 values, or from great social convulsions, or from abnormal fluc- 

 tuations in credit and prices, the exaltation of wages is slight, 

 or at best temporary, and the depression which inevitably 

 follows is severe and long. In evil times no one suffers so 

 much as the labourer, and especially the poorer labourer, and 

 never in the history of English labour did the workman suffer 

 more than in the epoch which commences, roughly speaking, 

 with 1545, and continues up to and beyond the year with 

 which these volumes close. The history of the English people 



