492 ON THE PRICE OF LAZOUR. 



is to be found in the history of their material condition, and 

 as they have suffered in past times, seriously and permanently, 

 from causes to which they contributed nothing, so it is possible 

 that in later times they may be misled by that ' passionate con- 

 fidence of interested falsehood ' of which Adam Smith speaks ; 

 which is at this time striving to mislead English workmen 

 under the specious names of reciprocity and fair trade into 

 retrograde opinions, in order that the selfish interests of an 

 existing generation of manufacturers and landowners, who are 

 grasping at larger profits and recovered rents, may make gain 

 out of ignorance on the one hand and sophistry on the other. 

 We shall have occasion to see how little high money values 

 and high wages correspond, from the irrefutable testimony of 

 historical prices, and may be perhaps able to infer as to what 

 is the true interest of the working classes, and indeed of all, 

 on the occurrence of analogous events in the future. Writing 

 as I do, in the middle of a passage over the Atlantic, I cannot 

 but be reminded of the voyage which nearly four centuries ago 

 the Genoese navigator first took over the unknown sea, and of 

 a venture which was to bring so much misery and so much 

 benefit to mankind. It is the common practice to charge the 

 discovery of the new world with the great change of prices 

 which ensued in the old. But if I am able to interpret the 

 facts aright, I shall show that, although sooner or later the 

 great additions made to the stock of the precious metals must 

 have been followed by an advance of prices, the economical 

 revolution of the sixteenth century in England should be 

 traced to a multiplicity of causes in which the mineral produce 

 of the new world played a secondary, a remote, and an 

 unimportant part, as compared with the great social events 

 on which I have been constrained to comment so frequently. 



In my former volumes I distinguished the labour of the 

 thresher from that of the harvest hand and the regular 

 labourer, because the time at which the thresher's work was 

 done was optional with the employer, that of the harvest 

 hand was at the discretion, at least in a greater degree, of the 



