An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of NationsSmith, Adam
History
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Smith, Adam
Economics
The produce of such labour comes frequently cheaper to market than would
otherwise be suitable to its nature. Stockings, in many parts of Scotland,
are knit much cheaper than they can anywhere be wrought upon the loom.
They are the work of servants and labourers who derive the principal part
of their subsistence from some other employment. More than a thousand pair
of Shetland stockings are annually imported into Leith, of which the price
is from fivepence to seven-pence a pair. At Lerwick, the small capital of
the Shetland islands, tenpence a-day, I have been assured, is a common
price of common labour. In the same islands, they knit worsted stockings
to the value of a guinea a pair and upwards.
The spinning of linen yarn is carried on in Scotland nearly in the same
way as the knitting of stockings, by servants, who are chiefly hired for
other purposes. They earn but a very scanty subsistence, who endeavour to
get their livelihood by either of those trades. In most parts of Scotland,
she is a good spinner who can earn twentypence a-week.
In opulent countries, the market is generally so extensive, that any one
trade is sufficient to employ the whole labour and stock of those who
occupy it. Instances of people living by one employment, and, at the same
time, deriving some little advantage from another, occur chiefly in poor
countries. The following instance, however, of something of the same kind,
is to be found in the capital of a very rich one. There is no city in
Europe, I believe, 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.
Lodging is not only much cheaper in London than in Paris; it is much
cheaper than in Edinburgh, of the same degree of goodness; and, what may
seem extraordinary, the dearness of house-rent is the cause of the
cheapness of lodging. The dearness of house-rent in London arises, not
only from those causes which render it dear in all great capitals, the
dearness of labour, the dearness of all the materials of building, which
must generally be brought from a great distance, and, above all, the
dearness of ground-rent, every landlord acting the part of a monopolist,
and frequently exacting a higher rent for a single acre of bad land in a
town, than can be had for a hundred of the best in the country; but it
arises in part from the peculiar manners and customs of the people, which
oblige every master of a family to hire a whole house from top to bottom.
A dwelling-house in England means every thing that is contained under the
same roof. In France, Scotland, and many other parts of Europe, it
frequently means no more than a single storey. A tradesman in London is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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