That the stock of the common people, in numbers, is not lessened, any more than the causes are impaired, is manifest, without being at the pains of an actual numeration.  An improved and improving agriculture, which implies a great augmentation of labor, has not yet found itself at a stand, no, not for a single moment, for want of the necessary hands, either in the settled progress of husbandry or in the occasional pressure of harvests.  I have even reason to believe that there has been a much smaller importation, or the demand of it, from a neighboring kingdom, than in former times, when agriculture was more limited in its extent and its means, and when the time was a season of profound peace.  On the contrary, the prolific fertility of country life has poured its superfluity of population into the canals, and into other public works, which of late years have been undertaken to so amazing an extent, and which have not only not been discontinued, but, beyond all expectation, pushed on with redoubled vigor, in a war that calls for so many of our men and so much of our riches.  An increasing capital calls for labor, and an increasing population answers to the call.  Our manufactures, augmented both for the supply of foreign and domestic consumption, reproducing, with the means of life, the multitudes which they use and waste, (and which many of them devour much more surely and much more largely than the war,) have always found the laborious hand ready for the liberal pay.  That the price of the soldier is highly raised is true.  In part this rise may be owing to some measures not so well considered in the beginning of this war; but the grand cause has been the reluctance of that class of people from whom the soldiery is taken to enter into a military life,—­not that, but, once entered into, it has its conveniences, and even its pleasures.  I have seldom known a soldier who, at the intercession of his friends, and at their no small charge, had been redeemed from that discipline, that in a short time was not eager to return to it again.  But the true reason is the abundant occupation and the augmented stipend found in towns and villages and farms, which leaves a smaller number of persons to be disposed of.  The price of men for new and untried ways of life must bear a proportion to the profits of that mode of existence from whence they are to be bought.

So far as to the stock of the common people, as it consists in their persons.  As to the other part, which consists in their earnings, I have to say, that the rates of wages are very greatly augmented almost through the kingdom.  In the parish where I live it has been raised from seven to nine shillings in the week, for the same laborer, performing the same task, and no greater.  Except something in the malt taxes and the duties upon sugars, I do not know any one tax imposed for very many years past which affects the laborer in any degree whatsoever; while, on the other hand, the tax upon houses not having