182 Slaney on Rural Expenditure. 



capital is different at one time and place from what it is at another, or what 

 it is that induces such a condition of things as makes the shares different. 

 To state how things vary, is not to state their absolute magnitude ; for one 

 may be indefinitely great, and another indefinitely small, and still both 

 vary after the same law. A labourer in Ireland will live and bring up a 

 family upon potatoes ; a labourer in England will see the world unpeopled 

 first. Why does not the labouring population in England increase, till wages 

 are reduced to the same condition as in Ireland ; or why is not the popula- 

 tion in Ireland diminished, till it bears the same proportion to capital as in 

 England? This is the question that wanted answering ; and the answer would 

 have pointed to another element essential to the determination of both wages 

 and profits, and whose existence is incompatible with the solution advanced. 

 And this element, as long since pointed out by Adam Smith, is the force of 

 opinion and habit. Englishmen have the physical capability of living on 

 potatoes, as much as other men, but fortunately they have not the habit; 

 and though it might be wrong to say they would starve first in their own 

 proper persons, they will utterly refuse to multiply upon such diet, the 

 effect of which on population is ultimately the same. And the causes of 

 these differences of habit are to be found in every thing that has affected 

 the past or affects the present condition of society, — in ancient institutions, 

 in modern improvements, in past and present laws, in battles lost and won, 

 in reformations of religion, in the progress of science, in the manners of the 

 higher classes, in the information of the lower, in every thing which man 

 can neither suddenly alter nor create, and which connects his present mode 

 of existence with that of his anc istors and his posterity. Fluctuations will 

 be perpetually taking place in the existing proportion between population 

 and capital ; but the element, which, in the midst of these, keeps the aver- 

 age rate of wages to one point and not to another, or which determines the 

 point to which wages shall tend as to a mean, is not physical, but mental. 

 There may be a lowest physical point somewhere, but happily all civilised 

 and most uncivilised nations are considerably above it. The New Hollander 

 may approach the lowest physical point, when he feeds on worms ; but this 

 has no bearing on the question, why one man lives on beef and another on 

 potatoes, for both diets are happily far removed from that of the New Hol- 

 lander. The Englishman will not live and bring up a family upon potatoes, 

 because, though he may consent to live on them when he can positively 

 procure nothing else, habit, custom, the opinion of those around him, have 

 made it in his eyes contemptible, irrational, absurd, for a man to be living 

 on potatoes, when he has the opportunity of getting any thing better. In 

 his hours of prosperity, therefore, he will to a certainty solace himself with 

 bacon, and most probably venture upon beef; and as this absorbs a greater 

 portion of his income, in what he views as necessary to his individual ex- 

 istence, it proportionally reduces his disposition to burthen himself with 

 new mouths. If the Irishman had the prospect of all this bacon and beef, 

 he would view it as convertible into potatoes for a family like a patriarch's. 

 The Englishman thinks it but decency to swallow all, and omits the fa- 

 mily. 



"And as opinions and habits determine the final" or average proportion 

 which shall be maintained between the numbers of the labouring popula- 

 tion and the funds for their support, or, in other words, determine the 

 average rate of wages, — so they also determine the average rate of profits of 

 stock, which are only the wages of another description of labourers, consist- 

 ing partly of the recompense of present labour exerted in the form of super- 

 intendence, and partly of the recompense of past labour exerted in the 

 creation of their capital. Public opinion and custom require, for example, 

 that a shopkeeper shall wear a good coat, shall drink at all times malt 

 liquor, and sometimes wine, and give them to his neighbours ; — that his 



