If a commodity is raised by authority above what it will yield with a profit to the buyer, that commodity will be the less dealt in.  If a second blundering interposition be used to correct the blunder of the first and an attempt is made to force the purchase of the commodity, (of labor, for instance,) the one of these two things must happen:  either that the forced buyer is ruined, or the price of the product of the labor in that proportion is raised.  Then the wheel turns round, and the evil complained of falls with aggravated weight on the complainant.  The price of corn, which is the result of the expense of all the operations of husbandry taken together, and for some time continued, will rise on the laborer, considered as a consumer.  The very best will be, that he remains where he was.  But if the price of the corn should not compensate the price of labor, what is far more to be feared, the most serious evil, the very destruction of agriculture itself, is to be apprehended.

Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarse discrimination, a want of such classification and distribution as the subject admits of.  Increase the rate of wages to the laborer, say the regulators,—­as if labor was but one thing, and of one value.  But this very broad, generic term, labor, admits, at least, of two or three specific descriptions:  and these will suffice, at least, to let gentlemen discern a little the necessity of proceeding with caution in their coercive guidance of those whose existence depends upon the observance of still nicer distinctions and subdivisions than commonly they resort to in forming their judgments on this very enlarged part of economy.

The laborers in husbandry may be divided,—­First, Into those who are able to perform the full work of a man,—­that is, what can be done by a person from twenty-one years of age to fifty.  I know no husbandry work (mowing hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of all persons within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knack and habit what they lose in activity.  Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man’s labor and that of another, from strength, dexterity, and honest application.  But I am quite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford a proportion of labor equal to any other five within the periods of life I have stated:  that is, that among such five men there will be one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and approximating to the first and the last.  So that, in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find the full complement of all that five men can earn.  Taking five and five throughout the kingdom, they are equal:  therefore an error with regard to the equalization of their wages by those who employ five, as farmers do at the very least, cannot be considerable.