When all trades and handicrafts are overstocked, it is a certain sign there is a fault in the management of the whole; for it is impossible there should be too many people if the country is able to feed them. Are provisions dear? Whose fault is that, as long as you have ground untilled and hands unemployed? But I shall be answered, that to increase plenty, must at long-run undo the farmer, or lessen the rents all over England. To which I reply, that what the husbandman complains of most, is what I would redress: the greatest grievance of farmers, gardeners, and others, where hard labour is required, and dirty work to be done, is, that they cannot get servants for the same wages they used to have them at. The day-labourer grumbles at sixteen pence to do no other drudgery, than what thirty years ago his grandfather did cheerfully for half the money. As to the rents, it is impossible they should fall while you increase your numbers; but the price of provisions, and all labour in general, must fall with them, if not before; and a man of a hundred and fifty pounds a-year, has no reason to complain that his income is reduced to one hundred, if he can buy as much for that one hundred as before he could have done for two. There is no intrinsic worth in money, but what is alterable with the times; and whether a guinea goes for twenty pounds or for a shilling, it is (as I have already hinted before) the labour of the poor, and not the high and low value that is set on gold or silver, which all the comforts of life must arise from. It is in our power to have a much greater plenty than we enjoy, if agriculture and fishery were taken care of, as they might be; but we are so little capable of increasing our labour, that we have hardly poor enough to do what is necessary to make us subsist. The proportion of the society is spoiled, and the bulk of the nation, which should every where consist of labouring poor, that are unacquainted with every thing but their work, is too little for the other parts. In all business where downright labour is shunned or over-paid, there is plenty of people. To one merchant you have ten book keepers, or at least pretenders; and every where in the country the farmer wants hands. Ask for a footman that for some time has been in gentlemen's families, and you will get a dozen that are all butlers. You may have chamber-maids by the score, but you cannot get a cook under extravagant wages.