An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of

64

The Wealth of Nations

they can find labourers 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

labour very high in it. The funds destined for the payment of

wages, the revenue and stock of its inhabitants, may be of the

greatest extent; but if they have continued for several centuries of

the same, or very nearly of the same extent, the number of labourers

employed every year could easily supply, and even more than sup-

ply, the number wanted the following year. There could seldom

be any scarcity of hands, nor could the masters be obliged to bid

against one another in order to get them. The hands, on the con-

trary, would, in this case, naturally multiply beyond their employ-

ment. There would be a constant scarcity of employment, and the

labourers would be obliged to bid against one another in order to

get it. If in such a country the wages off labour had ever been

more than sufficient to maintain the labourer, and to enable him

to bring up a family, the competition of the labourers and the

interest of the masters would soon reduce them to the lowest rate

which is consistent with common humanity. China has been long

one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated,

most industrious, and most populous, countries in the world. It

seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who

visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultiva-

tion, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which

they are described by travellers in the present times. It had, per-

haps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of

riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to

acquire. The accounts of all travellers, inconsistent in many other

respects, agree in the low wages of labour, and in the difficulty

which a labourer finds in bringing up a family in China. If by

digging the ground a whole day he can get what will purchase a

small quantity of rice in the evening, he is contented. The condi-

tion of artificers is, if possible, still worse. Instead of waiting indo-

lently in their work-houses for the calls of their customers, as in

Europe, they are continually running about the streets with the

tools of their respective trades, offering their services, and, as it

were, begging employment. The poverty of the lower ranks of

people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in

Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton, many hundred, it is

commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on

the land, but live constantly in little fishing-boats upon the rivers

and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty, that

they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard

from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or

cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome

to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other coun-

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65

Adam Smith

tries. Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness

of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great

towns, several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned

like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is

even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn

their subsistence.

China, however, though it may, perhaps, stand still, does not

seem to go backwards. Its towns are nowhere deserted by their

inhabitants. The lands which had once been cultivated, are no-

where neglected. The same, or very nearly the same, annual labour,

must, therefore, continue to be performed, and the funds des-

tined for maintaining it must not, consequently, be sensibly di-

minished. The lowest class of labourers, therefore, notwithstand-

ing their scanty subsistence, must some way or another make shift

to continue their race so far as to keep up their usual numbers.

But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds des-

tined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying. Every

year the demand for servants and labourers would, in all the dif-

ferent classes of employments, be less than it had been the year

before. Many who had been bred in the superior classes, not being

able to find employment in their own business, would be glad to

seek it in the lowest. The lowest class being not only overstocked

with its own workmen, but with the overflowings of all the other

classes, the competition for employment would be so great in it,

as to reduce the wages of labour to the most miserable and scanty

subsistence of the labourer. Many would not be able to find em-

ployment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or

be driven to seek a subsistence, either by begging, or by the perpe-

tration perhaps, of the greatest enormities. Want, famine, and mor-

tality, would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence

extend themselves to all the superior classes, till the number of

inhabitants in the country was reduced to what could easily be

maintained by the revenue and stock which remained in it, and

which had escaped either the tyranny or calamity which had de-

stroyed the rest. This, perhaps, is nearly the present state of Ben-

gal, and of some other of the English settlements in the East Indies.

In a fertile country, which had before been much depopulated,

where subsistence, consequently, should not be very difficult, and

where, notwithstanding, three or four hundred thousand people

die of hunger in one year, we maybe assured that the funds des-

tined for the maintenance of the labouring poor are fast decaying.

The difference between the genius of the British constitution, which

protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile

company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, can-

not, perhaps, be better illustrated than by the different state of

those countries.

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