(a) The _agreeableness_ or disagreeableness of rendering a given set of services will affect the Supply of laborers at that point, and help to determine the rate of Wages paid to them; because the more agreeable employment will attract the larger number of laborers, will experience in consequence the press of competition, and the rate of wages then and there will be lessened thereby. The more disagreeable employment will feel less the pressure of numbers, and will secure, other things being equal, a higher rate of remuneration in consequence. Among the elements which, in spite of diversity of tastes, make any employment agreeable or disagreeable to the laborers, are (1) the less or greater exertion of physical strength required, (2) the healthfulness or unhealthfulness of the service, (3) its cleanliness or dirtiness, (4) the degree of liberty or confinement in it, (5) the safety or hazard of the employment, (6) the esteem or disrepute of it in public opinion. To illustrate each of these in order, the stone-mason, the glass-blower, the scavenger, the factory operative, the worker in a powder-mill, the smuggler, will each receive a larger compensation owing to the peculiar element of disagreeableness involved in his own personal service; and he will be able to demand and secure the higher rate through the action of this disagreeableness upon the Supply of such laborers. Of all these elements, public opinion is perhaps the most operative; and if this be favorable to an employment, and some social consideration be attached to it, and only common qualifications be required for it, the wages in it will infallibly be low. This is doubtless the main reason why so many young women prefer to teach, rather than be employed in mills or shops or offices, and why the wages of female teachers have been so remarkably low; although each of the elements of agreeableness specified above may also contribute something towards the same result. If a business be decidedly opposed to public opinion, it must hold out the inducement of a large reward, or nobody will engage in it. This explains the abnormal gains of the slave-trade, the liquor-business, of gambling-houses, and of lotteries.