The wages of labour cannot be reduced below the standard necessary to support the labourer and his family whilst he produces. If he cannot obtain this support he ceases to be a producer. He is starved out of existence; or he falls upon the public fund for the support of want; or he becomes a beggar or a thief. In states of society where there is no accumulating capital, the labourer necessarily receives low wages, because he maintains himself at the minimum of subsistence. Our poet Spenser, writing nearly three centuries ago upon the miseries of Ireland, describes the cottiers as inhabiting "swine-sties rather than houses." Swift, long after, describes the same state of things:--"There are thousands of poor wretches who think themselves blessed if they can obtain a hut worse than the squire's dog-kennel, and an acre of ground for a potato plantation." This condition of society unhappily lasted up to our own day. If the Irish cottier had been a labourer for wages instead of deriving his miserable living direct from the land, he would have been no better off, unless his desire for something higher than the coarsest food, and the most wretched lodging, had set some limit to the increase of population beyond the increase of capital. Population necessarily increases faster than subsistence when there is no restraint upon the increase by the disposition to accumulate on the part of the labourer. There may be accumulation in the form of his money-savings; and there may be accumulation in an increase of the conveniences of life by which he is surrounded. When there is neither money saved nor comforts increased--when there is no accumulation for the gratification of other wants than that of food--competition is driving the labourers to the lowest point of misery. The competition in Ireland was for the possession of land, at an extravagant rent, out of the labour upon which the cottier could only obtain the very lowest amount of necessaries for his subsistence. If, in the habits of the whole body of the peasantry, clothes and furniture had been as necessary as potatoes, the oppressive exactions of the landlords must have yielded to what then would have been the natural rate, whether we call it profit or wages, necessary for the maintenance of that peasantry; and the necessity, on their part, for maintaining the average _status_ of their class, would in a considerable degree have kept down the inordinate increase of the people. A century ago the great body of the working-people of England ate rye bread, which is cheaper than wheaten. If all the workers were to come back to rye-bread, the rate at which they could be comfortably maintained would be somewhat less; and unless the accumulation from the economy were expended universally in some improved accommodation, labourers would gradually arise who would be contented with the smaller amount necessary for subsistence, and the greater number of labourers seeking for wages