pal article in the diet of each being taken as indicating the wages which must there be paid to keep the supply of labor good. Thus it is said the Chinese will breed up to the point where a sufficiency of food of the meanest kind, even including much of what we call vermin, can be obtained to rear a constantly-increasing number of laborers of small stature and low vitality. The East Indians, again, are satisfied with rice; and population in that country, accordingly, will increase on that diet, even in the face of the certainty of a famine on an average once in four or five years. The Irish, again, are satisfied with a potato diet,' and will increase up to the limits of subsistence on that food, though at the constantly-imminent risk of a scarcity from the failure of that most uncertain crop. The Scotch,

shillings weekly will certainly not pay less than; the artisan receiving 30, 35 shillings or £2 will pay and, including rates and taxes, probably .-Agricultural Lock-out of 1874, p. 246.

In France, Lord Brabazon reports: "Whilst at about the same period town workmen were earning wages 53.32 per cent higher than agricultural laborers, these latter were paying 40.45 per cent less rent."-Report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1872, p. 49.

The well-known passion of the Netherlander for having a whole house, however small, to himself, must, I think, result in a larger proportional expenditure in this direction by common laborers than by the higher classes. I note also that Dr. Engel's computations do not agree very well with those given by Mr. Scott respecting the expenditures of families in Würtemburg. (Report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1872, pp. 196, 197, 205.)

'Mr. Brassey says of the Coolie laborers employed on the railways in India: "Their food consists of two pounds of rice a day, mixed with a little curry; and the cost of living on this, their usual diet, is only 18. a week."-Work and Wages, p. 88.

"No fewer than four great scarcities, amounting almost to famines," since the mutiny, namely, 1861-2, 1865-6, 1868-9, 1873-4.-The Duke of Argyle, quoted by London Economist, May 9, 1874.

* “A laborer in Ireland will live and bring up a family on potatoes; a laborer in England will see the world unpeopled first."-General T. Perronet Thompson.

"Three times the number of persons can be fed on an acre of potatoes who can be maintained on an acre of wheat in ordinary seasons."-Alison's History of Europe, 1815-51, xviii., p. 11.

again, pitch their minimum of wages at an oaten diet; the Germans, at a diet of black bread; while the English insist, at the very lowest, upon wheaten bread, though unfortunately not so rigidly and persistently but that a considerable unnecessary mortality at the extremes of life, and a lowering of the vital force among large portions of the actual workers, take place.'

It will be seen that, according to this doctrine, the neces-sary wages of every country are fixed by the habits of living among the people, and that at any given time there is a point below which wages can not go without diminishing the supply of labor. This point may change from one period to another. A people broken down by industrial misfortune or crowded by too rapid propagation may temporarily be driven to a lower and meaner diet; and instead of resenting this by withholding their increase, and thereby opening the way, or at least holding the way open, to a return to better times and circumstances, may accept the degradation to which they are thus violently brought; may lay aside that self-respect and self-control which had hitherto kept them from sinking in the social scale, and consent to bring children into the world to share their own miserable lot. Thus, in a single generation, a new scale of wages may be determined, and population adjust itself accordingly. Instances of such lowering of the necessary wages of a people are unfortunately not uncommon.

' Prof. Cairnes makes a remark in his Logical Method of Pol. Econ. which is liable to be misunderstood. He says: "It is not asserted that population in fact increases faster than subsistence; this would, of course, be physically impossible." In one sense of the word increase, that, namely, which the vital statisticians intend by the phrase "effective increase," Prof. Cairnes's remark is unexceptionable; but there is nothing to prevent persons from being born into the world in large numbers, for whom there is not food enough to keep them alive, and who must consequently die prematurely. Most people would say that in such cases "" population in fact increases faster than subsistence." Population, of course, can not increase and remain beyond the limits of subsistence.

On the other hand, a people accustomed to a low and mean diet, and to circumstances of filth and squalor, may, under impulses moral or economical, which it is not necessary to recite, raise themselves to a new standard of living,' involving a new scale of wages, which thereafter become necessary to them, and which determine population accordingly.

Such a change, involving the substitution of the best wheaten bread for that of an inferior quality,' passed upon the masses of the English people between 1715 and 1765. Food wages rose, yet, as population did not increase correspondingly in consequence, there was a "decided elevation in the standard of their comforts and conveniences." Such a change has, by the testimony of observers who can not be doubted, been passing over Ireland since 1850; and the temporary relief from excessive population afforded by famine and forced emigration has, under the impulse of that terrific suffering, been taken advantage of to reach a somewhat higher standard of living.' A similar change, for which an easy opportunity is offered in the rapid increase of production, through the discovery of new resources in nature, and new arts and appliances in industry, is, I am fain to believe, passing upon not a few of the people of Europe who are taking advantage of the liberality of art and nature, not to increase their numbers to the limit of their former modes of life, but to snatch something, at least, as a store for the future, and something for greater decency and comfort in the present.

1 "The habits of the English and Scotch laborers of the present day are as widely different from those of their ancestors in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. as they now are from the habits of the laborers of France and Spain.”—J. R. McCulloch, Pol. Econ., p. 392.

* Malthus, Pol. Econ., p. 229.

Note, for instance, the very general introduction of cornmeal in place, in part, of the potato. (See Mr. Purdy's paper in the Statistical Journal, xxv. 459-60.)

It is in this view of the relation of food to the increase of population, that economists have very generally been agreed in pronouncing cheap food a source of much evil to any people that adopts it. This doctrine can not be better stated than in the language of Prof. Rogers:

"A community which subsists habitually on dear food is in a position of peculiar advantage when compared with another which lives on cheap food; one, for instance, which lives on wheat as contrasted with another which lives on rice or potatoes; and this quite apart from the prudence or incautiousness of the people. Two instances will illustrate this rule. The Irish famine of 1846 was due to the sudden disease which affected the potato. It was equally severe in the northern parts of Scotland, and particularly in the Western Highlands; its effects, as we all know, were terrible; but the same disease affected the same plant in England. That, however, which was distress to the English was death to the Irish and the Highlanders; they had nothing else to resort to,' they subsisted on the cheapest food. Now, were such a calamity as the potato-disease to attack wheat in England, formidable as the consequences would be, they would not be destructive.”

Now, I dare say Prof. Rogers would be very slow to ap

1 "When the standard of natural or necessary wages is highwhen wheat and beef, for example, form the principal part of the food of the laborer, and porter and beer the principal part of his drink, he can bear to retrench in a period of scarcity. Such a man has room to fall; he can resort to cheaper sorts of food—to barley, oats, rice, and potatoes. But he who is habitually fed on the cheapest food has nothing to resort to when deprived of it. Laborers placed in this situation are absolutely cut off from every resource. You may take from an Englishman, but you can not take from an Irishman. The latter is already so low he can fall no lower; he is placed on the very verge of existence; his wages, being regulated by the price of potatoes, will not buy wheat, or barley, or oats; and whenever, therefore, the supply of potatoes fails, it is next to impossible that he should escape falling a sacrifice to famine."-J. R. McCulloch, Pol. Econ., p. 396. *Pol. Econ., pp. 70, 71.

prove the theory of the British Legislature in seeking, as late as 1774, to discourage the use of cotton goods, and to restrict the people to the costlier fabrics of linen, silk, and wool. Yet why should not dear clothing be desired as an element in high necessary wages, as much as dear food? If necessary wages, called 100, be made up of dear food, 90, and cheap clothing, 10, is it not the same, in the result, as if the constituents were cheap food, 80, and dear clothing, 20? And, if famine comes, does not the possibility of going down from dear clothing to cheap clothing, from woollen,' say, to cotton, or from flax' to cotton, afford a margin, just as truly as the substitution of cheap for dear food? If so, how does this laudation of dear food for the people consist with the laudation of the machinery which cheapens the clothing of the people? Yet economists who will not admit the wholesale supersedure of human labor by cotton and woollen machinery in the early part of this century, and the consequent throwing out of employment of vast numbers of men and women to sink into pauperism and squalor, to be even a qualification of the advantages of introducing machinery to cheapen clothing, are unhesitating in their denunciation of cheap food.

It appears to me that cheap food, just like cheap clothing, ought to be, and but for the folly and wickedness of men would be, a blessing to the race; that, to any free, industrious, and self-respecting people, to-day, every cheap

'One pound of wool manufactured into flannel costs 38. 1d.; 1lb. flax into shirting, 28. 4d.; 1 lb. cotton into shirting, 18. The materials for a full dress of outer garments if composed of wool would not cost less than thirty shillings; while the same quantity of material of cotton, and of more durable quality, costs only 78. 6d. to 10s. (Mr. Ashworth, quoted by Prof. Levi, Statistical Journal, xxvi. 36.)

One hundred pounds of flax will produce about 200 yards of white cloth. One hundred pounds cotton, 300 yards of pretty equal general appearance, taking a medium set of light cloth as an example. (Mr. John Mulholland, Soc. Sc. Trans., 1867, p. 151.)