ll 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.

Secondly, Those who are able to work, but not the complete task of a
day-laborer. This class is infinitely diversified, but will aptly enough
fall into principal divisions. _Men_, from the decline, which after
fifty becomes every year more sensible, to the period of debility and
decrepitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. _Women_,
whose employment on husbandry is but occasional, and who differ more in
effective labor one from another than men do, on account of gestation,
nursing, and domestic management, over and above the difference they
have in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining
life. _Children_, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to
greater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to
labor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visible
to those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into the
interior economy of a poor-house.

This inferior classification is introduced to show that laws prescribing
or magistrates exercising a very stiff and often inapplicable rule, or a
blind and rash discretion, never can provide the just proportions
between earning and salary, on the one hand, and nutriment on the other:
whereas interest, habit, and the tacit convention that a