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Til E NATURE AMD C A USDS OK

In 1740, a year of extraordinary scarcity, many people werewilling to work for bare subsistence. In the succeeding yearsof plenty, it was more difficult to get labourers and servants.

The scarcity of a dear year, by diminishing the demandfor labour, tends to lower its price, as the high price of pro-visions tends to raise it. The plenty of a cheap year, on thecontrary, by increasing the demand, tends to raise the priceof labour, as the cheapness of provisions tends to lower it. Inthe ordinary variations of the price of provisions, those twoopposite causes seem to counterbalance one another ; whichis probably in part the reason why the wages of labour areeverywhere so much more steady and permanent than theprice of provisions.

The increase in the wages of labour necessarily increasesthe price of many commodities, by increasing that part of itwhich resolves itself into wages, and so far tends to diminishtheir consumption both at home and abroad. The same cause,however, which raises the wages of labour, the increase ofstock, tends to increase its productive powers, and to make asmaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work.The owner of the stock which employs a great number oflabourers necessarily endeavours, for his own advantage, tomake such a proper division an ( d distribution of employment,that they may be enabled to produce the greatest quantity ofwork possible. For the same reason, he endeavours to supplythem with the best machinery which either he or they canthink of. What takes place among the labourers in a parti-cular workhouse, takes plage, for the same reason, amongthose of a great society. The greater their number, the morethey naturally divide themselves into different classes andsubdivisions of employment. More heads are occupied ininventing the proper machinery for executing the work ofeach, and it is, therefore, more likely to be invented. Thereare many commodities, therefore, which, in consequence ofthese improvements, come to be produced by so much lesslabour than before, that the increase of its price is more thancompensated by the diminution of its quantity.

CHAP. IX.

Of the Profits of Stock.

The rise and fall in the profits of stock depend upon thesame causes with the rise and fall in the wages of labour, the