I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation, that this may be true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer and the laborer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at the time of his health and vigor, and in ordinary times of abundance.  But in calamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, and with the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of the community, but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who produce them, what is to be done?  When a man cannot live and maintain his family by the natural hire of his labor, ought it not to be raised by authority?

On this head I must be allowed to submit what my opinions have ever been, and somewhat at large.

And, first, I premise that labor is, as I have already intimated, a commodity, and, as such, an article of trade.  If I am right in this notion, then labor must be subject to all the laws and principles of trade, and not to regulations foreign to them, and that may be totally inconsistent with those principles and those laws.  When any commodity is carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the necessity of the purchaser, that raises the price.  The extreme want of the seller has rather (by the nature of things with which we shall in vain contend) the direct contrary operation.  If the goods at market are beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise.  The impossibility of the subsistence of a man who carries his labor to a market is totally beside the question, in this way of viewing it.  The only question is, What is it worth to the buyer?

But if authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, what is this in the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labor of ten or twelve laboring men, and three or four handicrafts,—­what is it but to make an arbitrary division of his property among them?

The whole of his gains (I say it with the most certain conviction) never do amount anything like in value to what he pays to his laborers and artificers; so that a very small advance upon what one man pays to many may absorb the whole of what he possesses, and amount to an actual partition of all his substance among them.  A perfect equality will, indeed, be produced,—­that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and, on the part of the partitioners, a woful, helpless, and desperate disappointment.  Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations.  They pull down what is above; they never raise what is below; and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.