has a direct tendency to lower the rate at which the profitable labour is paid,--to prevent the payment of "fair wages;" and that there is a "plan" which requires no devising, because our necessities are constantly calling it into operation,--the natural law of exchange, which makes "work at hand" wherever there is capital to pay for it. Such reasoners also held that the labourers were not to seek for the fund "about the country on an uncertainty;" but that the work for the labourers "should be at hand"--"it should be certain." This clearly was not the ordinary labour-fund. That is neither always at hand, nor is it always certain. It shifts its place according to its necessity for use; it is uncertain in its distribution in proportion to the demand upon it. The fund which was to work this good was clearly not the labour-fund--it was the _want_-fund; and the mistake that these gentlemen and many others fell into was that the want-fund had qualities of far greater powers of usefulness than the labour-fund; that the parish purse was the purse of Fortunatus, always full; that the parish labour field was like the tent of the Indian queen in the Arabian tale--you could carry it in the palm of your hand, and yet it would give shelter to an army of thousands. All these fallacies are now, happily, as much exploded as the laws for the regulation of wages and the price of commodities. The real labour-fund--the accumulation of a portion of the results of past labour--is the only fund which can find profitable work and pay fair wages. It is extremely difficult to ascertain the ratio of Capital to Population at any particular period; yet some approximations may be made, which, in a degree, may indicate the activity or the inertness of the labour-fund, in regard to the condition of the labourer.