What would, at this rate, become of our manufactures? If the merchant would send cloth abroad, he must make it himself, for the clothier cannot get one man out of twelve that used to work for him. If what I speak of was only to befal the journeymen shoemakers, and nobody else, in less than a twelvemonth, half of us would go barefoot. The chief and most pressing use there is for money in a nation, is to pay the labour of the poor, and when there is a real scarcity of it, those who have a great many workmen to pay, will always feel it first; yet notwithstanding this great necessity of coin, it would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money, than without poor; for who would do the work? For this reason the quantity of circulating coin in a country, ought always to be proportioned to the number of hands that are employed; and the wages of labourers to the price of provisions. From whence it is demonstrable, that whatever procures plenty, makes labourers cheap, where the poor are well managed; who as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get. All men, as Sir William Temple observes very well, are more prone to ease and pleasure than they are to labour, when they are not prompted to it by pride and avarice, and those that get their living by their daily labour, are seldom powerfully influenced by either: so that they have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing, then, that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money; for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy.