822 ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 



4S., the average being 3^. $\d. Now the price of wheat had 

 risen above its old rate from unity to 3-166, of labour from 

 unity to 1-729. The quarter sessions assessment, which took 

 into account ' the plenty and scarcity of provisions and other 

 necessaries,' will be seen to have been a very potent engine. 

 And yet my prices are higher than their allowances. 



Among the recognised and accredited economists, Adam 

 Smith is the only writer who has attempted to grapple in the 

 least degree with the historical causes which have induced on 

 English labour its present condition. He had indeed no statis- 

 tical information as to the wages of labour at different epochs of 

 English history, though there is little doubt that his work led 

 to Sir Frederic Eden's enquiry into the State of the Poor. 

 But Smith was far too shrewd and sagacious a person to doubt 

 that there were causes other than the action of workmen them- 

 selves for the beggarly condition to which they had been 

 reduced, a condition soon to be far worse. He denounced 

 with honest and becoming indignation the infamous law of 

 parochial settlement, a law which stimulated the most sordid 

 dishonesty among many landowners. He exposed the sophism 

 often uttered by selfish and scheming knaves of the pro- 

 tectionist and fair-trading school, that high prices of food 

 bring with them high rates of wages, a falsehood which 

 will I trust be sufficiently refuted by these pages. ' The 

 wages of labour,' he says, * do not sink with the profits of 

 stock. The demand for labour increases with the increase 

 of stock whatever be its profits 1 .' He did not therefore think 

 it just that violent efforts should be made to reduce the rate 

 of wages when ordinary profits, according to interested 

 clamour, declined, or seemed to decline. Above all, his 

 experience of human affairs saved him from uttering the 

 absurdity so common among modern economists, that wages 

 cannot increase except at the cost of profits. He saw indeed 

 that some profits could be procured by the starvation of 

 labour, but he denounced the system and its agents, and 



1 Wealth of Nations, i. 97. 



