In North America, provisions are much cheaper and wages much higher than in England. In the province of New York, common labourers earn three shillings and sixpence currency, equal to two shillings sterling a day. Till after the middle of the fourteenth century, an English mason’s wages were much higher than those of a parish priest. In spite of a statute of Anne there are still [1776] many curacies under £20 a year. A middling farmer in France will sometimes have 400 fowls in his yard. Between 1339 and 1776 the price of the best English wool has fallen from 30s. to 21s. the tod, after allowing for the changes in the currency. The price of a yard of the finest cloth has fallen, after making the same allowances, from £3, 3s. 6d. to £1, 1s. since 1487. The first person that wore stockings in England is said to have been Queen Elizabeth. She received them as a present from the Spanish Ambassador. What was formerly a seat of the family of Seymour, is now an inn upon the Bath road. The marriage bed of James the First of Great Britain, which his Queen brought with her from Denmark as a present fit for a sovereign to make to a sovereign, was a few years ago the ornament of an alehouse at Dunfermline. The wool of the southern counties of Scotland is, a great part of it, after a long land carriage through very bad roads, manufactured in Yorkshire, for want of a capital to manufacture it at home. In England, owing to the laws of settlement, it is often more difficult for a poor man to pass the artificial boundary of a parish than an arm of the sea or a ridge of high mountains. There is no city in Europe in which house rent is dearer than in London, and yet I know no capital in which a furnished apartment can be hired so cheap. At Buenos Ayres forty years ago 1s. 9½d. was the ordinary price of an ox. A piece of fine cloth which weighs only eighty pounds, contains in it the price not only of eighty pounds weight of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the maintenance of the different working people, and of their immediate employers. In the white herring fishery it has been common for vessels to fit out for the purpose of catching not the fish but the bounty. In 1759, when the bounty was at fifty shillings the ton, each barrel of sea sticks cost Government in bounties alone, £113, 15s.; each barrel of merchantable herrings £159, 7s. 6d. The _Wealth of Nations_ is a book to be read as it was written. More than half its nutriment and all its fascination is lost if you cut away the theory from its historical setting.[29] Osteology is fatal to economics. That is why the _Wealth of Nations_ is far better suited to beginners than an ordinary child’s primer. But as the Lectures on Police were the author’s own first draft, the reader of these pages is already cognisant of a great part of the _Wealth of Nations_.