There are certain circumstances which sometimes give the laborers an advantage, and enable them to raise their wages considerably. When in any country the demand for those who live by wages is continually increasing; when every year furnishes employment for a greater number than had been employed the year before, the workmen have no occasion to combine in order to raise their wages. The scarcity of hands occasions a competition among masters, who bid against one another in order to get them, and thus voluntarily break through the natural combination of masters not to raise wages.
The demand for those who live by wages necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it. The increase of revenue is the increase of national wealth.
The demand for those who live by wages, therefore, naturally increases with the increase of national wealth, and cannot possibly increase without it.
It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labor. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labor are highest.
England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America. The wages of labor, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England.
Though North America is not yet so rich as England, it is much more thriving, and advancing with much greater rapidity to the further acquisition of riches. The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants. In Great Britain and most other European countries they are not supposed to double in less than five hundred years. In the British colonies in North America, it has been found, that they double in twenty or twenty-five years. Nor in the present times is this increase principally owing to the continual importation of new inhabitants, but to great multiplication of the species. Labor is there so well rewarded that a numerous family of children, instead of being a burden, is a source of opulence and prosperity to the parents.
Notwithstanding the great increase, there is a continual complaint of the scarcity of hands in North America. The demand for laborers, the funds destined for maintaining them, increase, it seems, still faster than they can find laborers to employ.
Though the wealth of a country should be very great, yet if it has been long stationary, we must not expect to find the wages of labor very high in it.
The funds destined for the payment of wages may be of the greatest extent, but if they have continued for several centuriesof the same, or very nearly of the same extent, the number of laborers employed every year could easily supply, and even more than supply, the number wanted the following year.
There could seldom be any scarcity of hands, nor could masters be obliged to bid against one another in order to get them. The hands, on the contrary, would, in this case, naturally multiply beyond their employment. There would be a constant scarcity of employment, and the laborers would be obliged to bid against one another in order to get it.If in such a country the wages of labor had ever been more than sufficient to maintain the laborer and to enable him to bring up a family, the competition of the laborers and the interest of the masters would soon reduce them to this lowest rate which is consistent with common humanity.