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.

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 fu