110

THE NATURE AND CAUSES OE

ference is frequently not so great. In time of peace, and inthe merchant service, the London price is from a guinea toabout seven-and-twenty shillings the calendar month. Acommon labourer in London , at the rate of nine or ten shil-lings a week, may earn in the calendar month from forty tofive-and-forty shillings. The sailor, indeed, over and abovehis pay, is supplied with provisions. Their value, however,may not perhaps always exceed the difference between hispay and that of the common labourer; and though it some-times should, the excess will not be clear gain to the sailor,because he cannot share it with his wife and family, whomhe must maintain out of his wages at home.

The dangers and hair-breadth escapes of a life of adven-tures, instead of disheartening young people, seem frequentlyto recommend a trade to them. A tender mother, among theinferior ranks of people, is often afraid to send her son toschool at a sea-port town, lest the sight of the ships and theconversation and adventures of the sailors should entice himto go to sea. The distant prospect of hazards, from which wecan hope to extricate ourselves by courage and address, is notdisagreeable to us, and does not raise the wages of labour inany employment. It is otherwise with those in which courageand address can be of no avail. In trades which are knownto be very unwholesome, the wages of labour are always re-markably high. Unwholesomeness is a species of disagree-ableness, and its effects upon the wages of labour are to beranked under that general head.

In all the different employments of stock, the ordinary rateof profit varies more or less with the certainty or uncertaintyof the returns. These are in general less uncertain in theinland than in the foreign trade, and in some branches of fo-reign trade than in others; in the trade to North America ,for example, than in that to Jamaica . The ordinary rate ofprofit always rises more or less with the risk. It docs not,however, seem to rise in proportion to it, or so as to com-pensate it completely. Bankruptcies are most frequent in themost hazardous trades. The most hazardous of all trades,that of a smuggler, though when the adventure succeeds it islikewise the most profitable, is the infallible road to bank-ruptcy. The presumptuous hope of success seems to act hereas upon all other occasions, and to entice so many adventurersinto those hazardous trades, that their competition reducestheir profit below what is sufficient to compensate the risk.