TIIK WEALTH OF NATIONS.

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even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or hedriven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the per-petration perhaps of the greatest enormities. Want, famine,and mortality, would immediately prevail in that class, andfrom thence extend themselves to all the superior classes,till the number of inhabitants in the country was reduced towhat could easily be maintained by the revenue and stockwhich remained in it, and which had escaped either the ty-ranny or calamity which had destroyed the rest. This per-haps is nearly the present state of Bengal, and of some otherof the English settlements in the East Indies. In a fertilecountry which had before been much depopulated, wheresubsistence, consequently, should not be very difficult, andwhere, notwithstanding, three or four hundred thousandptople die of hunger in one year, we may be assured that thefunds destined for the maintenance of the labouring poor arefast decaying. The difference between the genius of theBritish constitution which protects and governs North Ame-rica , and that of the mercantile company which oppressesand'domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be betterillustrated than by the different state of those countries.

The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the neces-sary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing nationalwealth. The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, onthe other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at astand, and their starving condition that they are going fastbackwards.

In Great Britain the wages of labour seem, in the presenttimes, to be evidently more than what is precisely necessaryto enable the labourer to bring up a family. In order to sa-tisfy ourselves upon this point it will not be necessary toenter into any tedious or doubtful calculation of what maybe the lowest sum upon which it is possible to do this. Thereare many plain symptoms that the wages ol labour are no-where in this country regulated by this lowest rate which isconsistent with common humanity.

First, in almost every part of Great Britain there is a dis-tinction, even in the lowest species of labour, between summerand winter wages. Summer wages are always highest. Buton account of the extraordinary expense of fuel, the mainte-nance of a family is most expensive in winter. Wages, there-fore, being highest when this expense is lowest, it seems evi-dent that they are not regulated by what is necessary for this

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