distinct causes, operating by different proportions, and often in conflicting directions, must be the practical the tendencies upwards or downwards which will affect wages universally.

result,

The four elements are these: :

Is

1. The rate of movement in the POPULATION: that steadily advancing or slowly receding? Does that tend to raise the value of wages, or to depress it?

2. The rate of movement in the national CAPITAL: Is that advancing or receding? And does it pro tanto therefore tend to raise or to depress the rate of wages?

3. The fluctuations in the price of necessaries, but, above all, of FOOD: Are those fluctuations from one decennium to another tending, upon the whole, to an advance or to a decline? Is the price of food from century to century, when taken with its complementary adjunct in the price of clothes, fire, and lodging, such as, upon the whole, to sustain wages to stimulate wages

or to depress them?

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4. The traditional STANDARD OF LIVING: Is that fortunately high and exacting in its requisitions? or is "man's life," to cite a strong word from Shakespeare, (whose profound humanity had fixed his attention upon the vast importance of a high scale in domestic comfort,) — " is man's life cheap as brutes'?" Is it in short an old English standard 2 which prevails, or a modern Irish

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standard? Is it that standard which elevated the noble yeomanry of England through six centuries, or that which has depressed to an abject animal existence the Irish serfs; and depressed the houseless lazzaroni of Naples, Peru, and Mexico to a sensual dependence upon sunshine and sleep? To these four elements some hasty thinkers would add a fifth, viz. the relative quantity of work to be done, and this certainly is important;

for, undoubtedly, if the population should increase, it will be a balance to that increase if the national work increases by the same proportion; and it will be more than a balance if the national work should increase more than proportionally. But the element of work to be done is already expressed implicitly in the first two elements of population and of capital; for, if the population increase, then the work of raising food must increase commensurately: and, again, if the capital increase, it will force some corresponding employment for itself by tentatively exploring every kind of new work that has any chance of proving profitable.

It is more important to notice, that all these four modifying causes of wages, though each separately for itself capable of several action, are also fitted to act in pairs, each two as a separate combination, Čevyos, or yoke of forces. Thus No. 1, or population, will act on wages at any rate; but it will act differently according as it is supported or thwarted by concurrent changes in capital. Population moving forward too rapidly would, cæteris paribus, be unfavorable to the prosperous movement of wages; yet if No. 2, the national capital,-i. e. if the funds for employing labor, should advance even faster than the labor, then it might happen that wages would rise, although under a state of the population otherwise unfavorable to wages. This conditional action of one element according to the state of the other is continually exhibited, and often ruinously, in our infant colonies. Work of some kind, in such colonies, there must be; for there is a population of some class and quality to feed and to furnish with dwelling-houses, firing, and the very coarsest manufactures; as to the finer, these are long supplied by importation. But with this primary basis for going to work, sometimes there is labor in excess present with little capital for employing it; sometimes there

is capital in excess, with no adequate labor of a proper quality for receiving the action of capital. Very lately, and therefore after all the benefit of our long experience on such subjects, the government commissioners sent down to Paisley (with a view to the relief of that town from her surplus population) shipped off to distant settlements in strange climates mechanics and weavers, who were found more useless for colonial labors than a band of mere gentlemen; having none of the hardy habits which, more even than practised skill, are requisite for rural industry, and, in general, for industry of that elementary class required in young or infant communities. And universally it may be said, as a first consideration in the general theory of colonization, that not only capital and labor should be harmoniously combined, so that neither agency may languish from defect of the appropriate reagency, but also that labor itself, in its several subdivisions, should be more cautiously assorted than has generally been the case. Houses form an instantaneous class of necessaries in new colonies; those rare cases being excepted in which the season of the year and the climate allow of a long encampment. 80 Yet how can houses advance harmoniously (that is, in such a concurrency of the parts that one part may not be kept waiting for the other) unless the masons or bricklayers are in due proportion to the carpenters, both to the woodcutters and sawyers, - and all four classes to the plasterers, slaters, (or tilers,) and glaziers? Or, again, supposing the forest game to be scarce, but that a river, frith, or bay, near to the settlement, offers an unusual abundance of fine fish, how injurious must be that neglect which should defeat this bountiful provision of nature by leaving unsummoned a due proportion of fishermen, boats, nets, &c., and, in some cases, of a curing establishment, completely mounted. Five hundred men thus employed might support the whole colony,

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and leave its main labor disposable for a wide variety of mixed pursuits; whilst, otherwise, the whole strength of the colony must be unavoidably sequestered into the one channel of raising subsistence. Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's improvement in colonization, first suggested about ten years ago, was the earliest step taken upon principle in the philosophic theory of this subject. He saw the fatal schism or divorce which took place continually between capital and labor. Rich men had hitherto bought vast tracts of land at a small cost, not with any view of really enclosing and cultivating their allotments, but in the confidence that a public interest would grow up in the colony, that other lands would be improved, and that their own private shares (however neglected) being well situated, and at length insulated by thriving farms, would benefit by the reacting value from the circumjacent lands; upon which consummation taking place, it would become their policy to sell. Thus was a considerable capital transferred to the colony, but not a capital which had much tendency to attract labor. Mr. Wakefield's system put an end to this abuse, or, at least, to its ruinous operation upon labor. The funds raised by the sale of the colonial land were applied, under regulations of law, and by fixed proportions, to the transportation of proper working families; as fast as the land sold itself, so fast were the funds raised for the attraction of labor; consequently, the want, the chief demand, bred commensurately its own relief, land, as at any rate it is a call for labor, now became a pledge or security for labor. This was a great improvement. But there is still much of the colonizing theory in arrear as respects the organization, in more salutary proportions, of labor according to its great capital varieties. We see that an army is a machine, not merely in the sense of its unity as to purpose through the great artifice of its discipline, but also through the variety

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of its arms, or organs, for services differing in kind, though yet co-operating to a common result. Social life requires a composition of the same nature in the adjustment of the labor by which it advances towards its purposes; and this composition cannot be neglected without deranging colonies in their infancy, by retarding, if such neglect of assortment does not wholly intercept and strangle, their expansive energies.

From all this, so far as we have yet gone, what is the inference? The inference is, that of the four great elements for determining wages, not one can be relied upon as an insulated or unconditional force; all are dependent upon each, and each upon all. For, if we call the rate of advancing population P, and the rate of advancing capital C, then, because P expresses the supply of men, and c expresses the demand for men, (since men are supplied in the ratio denoted by the growth of population, and men are demanded in the ratio denoted by the growth of capital for employing them,) it follows that in fact P+c makes but one compound force as regards wages; the final effect upon wages being determined by the excess of either element, P or C, in its modification of the other. And again, if we denote the average rate of price, upwards or downwards, upon the necessaries of workmen by N, and the traditional standard of living amongst the workmen of that nation by s, then will s+ N express practically, through each period of a generation, not two separate forces acting upon wages, but one single force, resulting from the balance or intermodification between the two. In this way the treatment of the question is simplified: we are not called upon, like an Indian juggler, always to play with four balls at once. The four elements, working in pairs, become two; and the problem is this, to compute à priori, (that is, by inference from a principle,) or to trace à posteriori, (that is, experi