The condition of the agricultural labourer had very much improved since the beginning of the century. In the seventeenth century his average daily wage had been 10 1/4d., while the average price of corn had been 38s. 2d. During the first sixty years of the eighteenth century his average wages were 1s., the price of corn 32s. Thus, while the price of corn had, thanks to a succession of good seasons, fallen 16 per cent, wages had risen to about an equal extent, and the labourer was thus doubly benefited. Adam Smith attributes this advance in prosperity to 'an increase in the demand for labour, arising from the great and almost universal prosperity of the country". but at the same time he allows that wealth had only advanced gradually, and with no great rapidity. The real solution is to be found in the slow rate of increase in the numbers of the people. Wealth had indeed grown slowly, but its growth had nevertheless been more rapid than that of population.
The improvement in the condition of the labourer was thus due to an increase in real and not only in nominal wages. It is true that certain articles, such as soap, salt, candles, leather, fermented liquors, had, chiefly owing to the taxes laid on them, become a good deal dearer, and were consumed in very small quantities; but the enhanced prices of these things were more than counterbalanced by the greater cheapness of grain, potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages, apples, onions, linen and woollen cloth, instruments made of the coarser metals, and household furniture. Wheaten bread had largely superseded rye and barley bread, which were 'looked upon with a sort of horror.' wheat being as cheap as rye and barley had been in former times. Every poor family drank tea once a day at least - a 'pernicious commodity,' a 'vile superfluity,' in Arthur Young's eyes. Their consumption of meat was 'pretty considerable'; that of cheese was 'immense.' In 1737 the day-labourers of England, 'by their large wages and cheapness of all necessaries,' enjoyed better dwellings, diet, and apparel in England, than the husbandmen or farmers did in other countries.' The middle of the eighteenth century was indeed about his best time, though a decline soon set in. By 1771 his condition had already been somewhat affected by the dear years immediately preceding, when prices had risen much faster than wages, although the change had as yet, according to Young, merely cut off his superfluous expenditure. By the end of the century men had begun to look back with regret upon this epoch in the history of the agricultural labourer as one of a vanished prosperity. At no time since the passing of the 43d of Elizabeth, wrote Eden in 1796, 'could the labouring classes acquire such a portion of the necessaries and conveniences of life by a day's work, as they could before the late unparalleled advance in the price of the necessaries of life.'
Nor were high wages and cheap food their only advantages. Their cottages were often rent-free, being built upon the waste. Each cottage had its piece of ground attached, though the piece was often a very small one, for the Act of Elizabeth, providing that every cottage should have four acres of land, was doubtless unobserved, and was repealed in 1775. Their common rights, besides providing fuel, enabled them to keep cows and pigs and poultry on the waste, and sheep on the fallows and stubbles. But these rights were already being steadily curtailed, and there was 'an open war against cottages.' consequent on the tendency to consolidate holdings into large sheepfarms. It was becoming customary, too, for unmarried labourers to be boarded in the farmers' houses.
On the whole, the agricultural labourer, at any rate in the south of England, was much better off in the middle of the eighteenth century than his descendants were in the middle of the nineteenth. At the later date wages were actually lower in Suffolk, Essex, and perhaps parts of Wilts, than they were at the former; in Berks they were exactly the same; in Norfolk, Bucks, Gloucestershire, and South Wilts, there had been a very trifling rise; with the exception of Sussex and Oxfordshire, there was no county south of the Trent in which they had risen more than one-fourth. Meanwhile rent and most necessaries, except bread, had increased enormously in cost, while most of the labourer's old privileges were lost, so that his real wages had actually diminished. But in the manufacturing districts of the north his condition had improved. While nominal wages in the south had risen on the average 14 per cent., here they had risen on the average 66 per cent. In some districts the rise had been as great as 200 per cent. In Arthur Young's time the agricultural wages of Lancashire were 4s. 6d. - the lowest rate in England; in 1821 they had risen to 14s. It may be roughly said that the relative positions of the labourer north and south of the Trent had been exactly reversed in the course of a century.
In Arthur Young's time the highest wages were to be found in Lincolnshire, the East Riding, and, following close upon these, the metropolitan and eastern counties. At first sight the high rate of wages in the first two counties seems to contradict the general law about their relative condition in north and south. But on investigation we find it to be due to exceptional circumstances. Arguing on the deductive method, we should conjecture a large demand for or a small supply of labour; and, in fact, we find both these influences in operation. The population had actually diminished, in Lincolnshire from 64 to 58 to the square mile, in the East Riding, from 80 to 71; this was partly due to the enclosures and the conversion of arable to pasture, partly to the increase of manufactures in the West Riding. Thus the labourers had been drawn off to the latter at the same time that they were being driven out of the agricultural districts. And for the remaining labourers there was a great demand in public works, such as turnpike-r and agricultural improvements on a large scale.
But there were many local variations of wages which are far less easy to bring under the ordinary rules of Political Economy, There was often the greatest inequality in the same county. In Lincolnshire, for instance, wages varied from 12s. 3d. to 7s., and even 6s. It was at this very time that Adam Smith, arguing deductively from his primary axiom that men follow their pecuniary interest, enunciated the law that wages tend to an equality in the same neighbourhood and the same occupation. Why then these variations? Adam Smith himself partly supplies the answer. His law pretends to exactness only 'when society is left to the natural course of things.' Now this was impossible when natural tendencies were diverted by legal restrictions on the movement of labour, such as the law of settlement, which resulted in confining every labourer to his own parish. But we must not seek the cause of these irregularities of wages merely in legal restrictions. Apart from disturbing influences such as this, men do not always act in accordance with their pecuniary interest; there are other influences at work affecting their conduct. One of the strongest of these is attachment to locality. It was this influence which partly frustrated the recent efforts of the Labourers' Union to remove the surplus labour of the east and south to the north. Again, there are apathy and ignorance, factors of immense importance in determining the action of the uneducated majority of men. In 1872 there were labourers in Devon who had never heard of Lancashire, where they might have been earning double their own wages. Human beings, as Adam Smith says, are 'of all baggage the most difficult to be transported,' though their comparative mobility depends upon the degree of their education, the state of communications, and the industrial conditions of any particular time. The English labourer to-day is far more easy to move than he was a hundred years ago. In a stirring new country like America there is much more mobility of labour than in England.
Turning from the agricultural wage-earners to those engaged in manufactures, we find their condition at this period on the whole much inferior to what it is now, in spite of the widening gulf between capitalist and labourer, the status of the artisan has distinctly improved since Adam Smith's time. His nominal wages have doubled or trebled. A carpenter then earned 2s. 6d. a day; he now earns 5s. 6d. A cotton weaver then earned 5s. a week, he now earns 20s., and so on. But it is difficult to compare the condition of the artisan as a whole at the two periods, because so many entirely new classes of workmen have come into existence during the past century; for instance, the engineers, whose Union now includes 50,000 men earning from 25s. to 40s. a week. And if wages have on the whole very greatly increased, there were, on the other hand, some obvious advantages which the artisan possessed in those days, but has since lost. For the manufacturing population still lived to a very great extent in the country. The artisan often had his small piece of land, which supplied him with wholesome food and healthy recreation. His wages and employment too were more regular. He was not subject to the uncertainties and knew nothing of the fearful sufferings which his descendants were to endure from commercial fluctuations, especially before the introduction of free trade. For the whole inner life of industry was, as we have seen, entirely different from what it now is. The relation between the workmen and their employers was much closer, so that in many industries they were not two classes but one. As among the agriculturists the farmer and labourer lived much the same life-for the capitalist farmers as a class were not yet in existence-and ate at the same board, so in manufacturing industries the journeyman was often on his way to become a master. The distribution of wealth was, indeed, in all respects more equal. Landed property, though gradually being concentrated, was still in a far larger number of hands, and even the great landlords possessed nothing like their present riches. They had no vast mineral wealth, or rapidly developing town property. A great number of the trading industries, too, were still in the hands of small capitalists. Great trades, like the iron trade, requiring large capital, had hardly come into existence.
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