THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

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The market price of any particular commodity, though itmay continue long above, can seldom continue long below,its natural price. Whatever part of it was paid below thenatural rate, the persons whose interest it affected would im-mediately feel the loss, and would immediately withdraweither so much land, or so much labour, or so much stock,from being employed about it, that the quantity brought tomarket would soon be no more than sufficient to supply theeffectual demand. Its market price, therefore, would soonrise to the natural price. This at least would be the casewhere there was perfect liberty.

The same statutes of apprenticeship and other corporationlaws indeed, which, when a manufacture is in prosperity,enable the workman to raise his wages a good deal abovetheir natural rate, sometimes oblige him, when it decays, tolet them down a good deal below it. As in the one case theyexclude many people from his employment, so in the otherthey exclude him from many employments. The effect ofsuch regulations, however, is not near so durable in sinkingthe workman’s wages below, as in raising them above, theirnatural rate. Their operation in the one way may endurefor many centuries, but in the other it can last no longer thanthe lives of some of the workmen who were bred to the bu-siness in the time of its prosperity. When they are gone, thenumber of those who are afterward educated to the tradewill naturally suit itself to the effectual demand. The policemust be as violent as that of Indostan or ancient Egypt (whereevery man was bound by a principle of religion to follow theoccupation of his father, and was supposed to commit themost horrid sacrilege if he changed it for another), which canill any particular employment, and for several generationstogether, sink either the wages of labour or the profits ofstock below their natural rate.

This is all that I think necessary to be observed at presentconcerning the deviations, whether occasional or permanent,of the market price of commodities from the natural price.

! The natural price itself varies with the natural rate of eachof its component parts, of wages, profit, and rent; and inevery society this rate varies according to their circumstances,according to their riches or poverty, their advancing, sta-tionary, or declining condition. I shall, in the four follow-ing chapters, endeavour to explain, as fully and distinctly asI can, the causes of those dilferent variations.