This favorable development is most striking in the colonies of rich and highly civilized parent countries, where the labor, capital and social customs of an old and ripe civilization are found together with the overflowing natural forces inherent in a virgin soil, engaged in the work of economic production. Here the growth of national wealth is most rapid; and the rate of wages is here wont to be highest.[172-3] With the high rate of interest that obtains where capital is rapidly saved, and with the low price of land, it is not a matter of difficulty for good workmen to enter into the ranks of landowners and capitalists. In North America, and especially in the western part,[172-4] it is very frequently in the normal course of economic development for young people to begin to work on wages, then to work on their own account, and finally to become themselves employers of labor. [Footnote 172-1: Compare _Hermann_, Staatswirths. Unters., 241 ff.; _J. S. Mill_, Principles, ch. 3. As to how _Carey_ confounds the rise and fall of the productiveness of labor with the rise and fall of wages, see _J. S. Mill's_ views in _Lange_, 1866, 218 ff.] [Footnote 172-2: In England, wages from 1400 to 1420, estimated in produce, were much higher than from 1500 to 1533. (Statist. Journal, 1861, 544 ff.) Later, a quarter of wheat was earned by day labor as follows: under Elizabeth, in about 48 days; during the seventeenth century, in 43 days; between 1700 and 1766, in 32 days; between 1815 and 1848, in from 19 to at most 28¾ days. (_Hildebrand_, Nat. Oek. der Gegenwart und Zukunft.) Since 1860, it has been earned in about 14 days. About 1668, the wages paid to English laborers and servants was one-third higher than twenty years before. (_Sir J. Child_, Discourse on Trade, p. 43 of the French translation.) _D. Defoe_, Giving Alms no Charity, 1704, draws a much more favorable picture of the time next succeeding. _Adam Smith_, Wealth of Nat., I, ch. 8, shows how money-wages, in the eighteenth century, were higher and the price of corn lower than in the seventeenth century. Between 1737 and 1797, wages in most parts of England, except in the immediate neighborhood of the great cities, doubled. (_Eden_, I, 385.) In Scotland, about the year 1817, the wages of married farm servants, expressed in corn, were about 60 per cent. higher than in 1792. (_Sinclair_, Grundgesetze des Ackerbaues, 105.)