When reference is had to the connection between real wages and prices, the question is a different one. General high prices would not change general _real wages_. But if high prices cause higher money wages in particular branches of trade, then, because the movement is not general, there will accrue, to those receiving more money, the means to buy more of real wages. And, as in practice, changes in prices which arise from an increased demand are partial, and not general, it often happens that high prices produce high real wages (not general high wages) in some, not in all employments. (For a further study of this relation between prices and wages the reader is advised to recall this discussion in connection with that in a later part of the volume, Book III, Chaps. XX and XXI.) 3. Another opinion often maintained is, that wages (meaning of course money wages) vary with the price of food; rising when it rises, and falling when it falls. This opinion is, I conceive, only partially true; and, in so far as true, in no way affects the dependence of wages on the proportion between capital and labor: since the price of food, when it affects wages at all, affects them through that law. Dear or cheap food caused by variety of seasons does not affect wages (unless they are artificially adjusted to it by law or charity): or rather, it has some tendency to affect them in the contrary way to that supposed; since in times of scarcity people generally compete more violently for employment, and lower the labor market against themselves. But dearness or cheapness of food, when of a permanent character, and capable of being calculated on beforehand, may affect wages. (1.) In the first place, if the laborers have, as is often the case, no more than enough to keep them in working condition and enable them barely to support the ordinary number of children, it follows that, if food grows permanently dearer without a rise of wages, a greater number of the children will prematurely die; and thus wages will ultimately be higher, but only because the number of people will be smaller, than if food had remained cheap. (2.) But, secondly, even though wages were high enough to admit of food’s becoming more costly without depriving the laborers and their families of necessaries; though they could bear, physically speaking, to be worse off, perhaps they would not consent to be so. They might have habits of comfort which were to them as necessaries, and sooner than forego which, they would put an additional restraint on their power of multiplication; so that wages would rise, not by increase of deaths but by diminution of births. In these cases, then, wages do adapt themselves to the price of food, though after an interval of almost a generation.(170) If wages were previously so high that they could bear reduction, to which the obstacle was a high standard of comfort