In the case of the farmer and the labourer, their interests are always
the same, and it is absolutely impossible that their free contracts can
be onerous to either party. It is the interest of the farmer, that his
work should be done with effect and celerity: and that cannot be, unless
the labourer is well fed, and otherwise found with such necessaries of
animal life, according to his habitudes, as may keep the body in full
force, and the mind gay and cheerful. For of all the instruments of
his trade, the labour of man (what the ancient writers have called
the instrumentum vocale) is that on which he is most to rely for the
repayment of his capital. The other two, the semivocale in the
ancient classification, that is, the working stock of cattle, and the
instrumentum mutum, such as carts, ploughs, spades, and so forth, though
not all inconsiderable in themselves, are very much inferior in utility
or in expense; or, without a given portion of the first, are nothing at
all. For, in all things whatever, the mind is the most valuable and
the most important; and in this scale the whole of agriculture is in a
natural and just order; the beast is as an informing principle to the
plough and cart; the labourer is as reason to the beast; and the farmer
is as a thinking and presiding principle to the labourer. An attempt to
break this chain of subordination in any part is equally absurd; but the
absurdity is the most mischievous in practical operation, where it is
the most easy, that is, where it is the most subject to an erroneous
judgment.
It is plainly more the farmer's interest that his men should thrive,
than that his horses should be well fed, sleek, plump, and fit for use,
or than that his waggons and ploughs should be strong, in good repair,
and fit for service.
On the other hand, if the farmer cease to profit of the labourer,
and that his capital is not continually manured and fructified, it
is impossible that he should continue that abundant nutriment, and
clothing, and lodging, proper for the protection of the instruments he
employs.
It is therefore the first and fundamental interest of the labourer,
that the farmer should have a full incoming profit on the product of his
labour. The proposition is self-evident, and nothing but the malignity,
perverseness, and ill-governed passions of mankind, and particularly the
envy they bear to each other's prosperity, could prevent their seeing
and acknowledging it, with thankfulness to the benign and wise Disposer
of all things, who obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing
their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own
individual success.
But who are to judge what that profit and advantage ought to be?
Certainly no authority on earth. It is a matter of convention dictated
by the reciprocal conveniences of the parties, and indeed by
their reciprocal necessities.--But, if the farmer is excessively
avaricious?--why so much the better--the more he desires to increase
his gains, the more interested is he in the good condition of those upon
whose labour his gains must principally depend.
I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation, that this may
be true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer and
the labourer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at the
time of his health and vigour, and in ordinary times of abundance. But
in calamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, and
with the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of the
community, but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who produce
them, what is to be done? When a man cannot live and maintain his
family by the natural hire of his labour, ought it not to be raised by
authority?
On this head I must be allowed to submit, what my opinions have ever
been; and somewhat at large. And, first, I premise that labour is, as I
have already intimated, a commodity, and, as such, an article of trade.
If I am right in this notion, then labour must be subject to all the
laws and principles of trade, and not to regulation foreign to them, and
that may be totally inconsistent with those principles and those laws.
When any commodity is carried to market, it is not the necessity of the
vender, but the necessity of the purchaser, that raises the price. The
extreme want of the seller has rather (by the nature of things with
which we shall in vain contend) the direct contrary operation. If the
goods at market are beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if
below it, they rise. The impossibility of the subsistence of a man, who
carries his labour to a market, is totally beside the question in his
way of viewing it. The only question is, what is it worth to the buyer?
But if the authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, who is
this in the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labour of ten or twelve
labouring men, and three or four handicrafts, what is it, but to make an
arbitrary division of his property among them?
The whole of his gains, I say it with the most certain conviction, never
do amount anything like in value to what he pays to his labourers and
artificers, so that a very small advance upon what ONE man pays to
MANY may absorb the whole of what he possesses, and amount to an actual
partition of all his substance among them. A perfect equality will
indeed be produced;--that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness,
equal beggary, and on the part of the petitioners, a woeful, helpless,
and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory
equalizations. They pull down what is above. They never raise what is
below: and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what
was originally the lowest.
If a commodity is raised by authority above what it will yield with
a profit to the buyer, that commodity will be the less dealt in. If a
second blundering interposition be used to correct the blunder of the
first, and an attempt is made to force the purchase of the commodity (of
labour for instance), the one of these two things must happen, either
that the forced buyer is ruined, or the price of the product of the
labour, in that proportion, is raised. Then the wheel turns round, and
the evil complained of falls with aggravated weight on the complainant.
The price of corn, which is the result of the expense of all the
operations of husbandry taken together, and for some time continued,
will rise on the labourer, considered as a consumer. The very best will
be, that he remains where he was. But if the price of the corn should
not compensate the price of labour, what is far more to be feared, the
most serious evil, the very destruction of agriculture itself, is to be
apprehended.
Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarse
discrimination: a want of such classification and distribution as the
subject admits of. Increase the rate of wages to the labourer, say the
regulators--as if labour was but one thing, and of one value. But this
very broad, generic term, LABOUR, admits, at least, of two or three
specific descriptions: and these will suffice, at least, to let
gentlemen discern a little the necessity of proceeding with caution
in their coercive guidance of those whose existence depends upon the
observance of still nicer distinctions and subdivisions than commonly
they resort to in forming their judgments on this very enlarged part of
economy.
The labourers in husbandry may be divided: 1st, into those who are able
to perform the full work of a man; that is, what can be done by a person
from twenty-one years of age to fifty. I know no husbandry-work (mowing
hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of all persons
within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knack and
habit what they lose in activity. Unquestionably, there is a good deal
of difference between the value of one man's labour and that of another,
from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure,
from my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total,
afford a proportion of labour equal to any other five within the periods
of life I have stated; that is, that among such five men there will be
one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and
the other three middling, and approximating to the first and the last.
So that in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find the
full complement of all that five men CAN earn. Taking five and five
throughout the kingdom, they are equal: therefore, an error with regard
to the equalization of their wages by those who employ five, as farmers
do at the very least, cannot be considerable. 2ndly. Those who are able
to work, but not the complete task of a day-labourer. This class is
infinitely diversified, but will aptly enough fall into principal
divisions. MEN, from the decline, which after fifty becomes every
year more sensible to the period of debility and decrepitude, and the
maladies that precede a final dissolution. WOMEN, whose employment on
husbandry is but occasional, and who differ more in effective labour
one from another, than men do, on account of gestation, nursing, and
domestic management, over and above the difference they have in common
with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining life. CHILDREN,
who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to greater utility,
but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to labour than is
found in the second of these subdivisions: as is visible to those who
will give themselves the trouble of examining into the interior economy
of a poor-house.
This inferior classification is introduced to show, that laws
prescribing, or magistrates exercising, a very stiff and often
inapplicable rule, or a blind and rash discretion, never can provide
the just proportions between earning and salary on the one hand,
and nutriment on the other: whereas interest, habit, and the tacit
convention, that arise from a thousand nameless circumstances, produce a
TACT that regulates without difficulty, what laws and magistrates cannot
regulate at all. The first class of labour wants nothing to equalize
it; it equalizes itself. The second and third are not capable of any
equalization.
But what if the rate of hire to the labourer comes far short of his
necessary subsistence, and the calamity of the time is so great as to
threaten actual famine? Is the poor labourer to be abandoned to the
flinty heart and griping hand of base self-interest, supported by the
sword of law, especially when there is reason to suppose that the
very avarice of farmers themselves has concurred with the errors of
government to bring famine on the land?