Besides, it not unfrequently happens, that the laboring class seek to oppose the decline of wages by increasing their industry, shortening their holidays and leisure, and by drawing their wives and children into their work. This may, under certain circumstances, result in an increase of the national income, and thus constitute a transition to the restoration of high wages, especially if beforehand there was reason to complain of the idleness of the working class. But if the other circumstances of competition are unfavorable to the working class, if especially they used their personally increased income to add to the population, it would not be long before they fell back to their previous state. In such case, the consequence is, that the same quantity of labor has become cheaper; that all permanent profit falls to the capitalists and landowners, and all that remains to the laboring class is only greater toil, a sadder home-life, and sadder children. The danger of such an issue is all the greater, because few things so much contribute to reckless marriages and the thoughtless procreation of children, as the industrial coöperation of wife and child.[174-7] [174-8] [Footnote 174-1: Hence _Adam Smith_ says that it is not the richest countries in which wages are highest, but those which are becoming rich most rapidly.] [Footnote 174-2: The classic lands of low wages and pauperism are especially the East Indies and China. A minister of Kienlong was punished after he had extorted about 20,000,000 thalers. (_Barrow_, II, 149.) In the confiscation of the well known _Keschen_, the authorities, according to their own accounts, found 682 pounds of gold and more than 6,000,000 pounds in silver. Considering the colossal banquets of the rich, embracing several hundred courses, of which _Meyen_, Reise um die Erde, II, 390, describes an example, the wretched food of the poor is doubly striking. Count _Görtz_ relates that in Canton, rats and serpents are regularly exposed for sale. (Reise, 445.) The lowness of wages appears from the fact--one of many--that servants frequently get nothing but their board. (_Haussmann_, Voyage en Chine, etc.) In the cities, tradesmen with their tools run hither and thither about the streets begging for employment in the most imploring manner. Thousands live all their lives on rafts. Numberless instances of infanticide from want of food, (§ 251.) The influence of these circumstances on the morality of the people is best illustrated by the fact that _Keschen_, when he was ambassador to Thibet, preferred to confide his newly collected treasures to the escort of the French missionaries he persecuted rather than to the mandarins named by himself, so much more highly did he estimate European than Chinese honesty. (Edinburg Rev., 1851, 425 ff.) In the Chinese