remoter parts of the country, for reasons which I shall have occasion to explain hereafter. But the wages of labor in a great town and its neighborhood are frequently a fourth or a fifth part, twenty or five-and-twenty per cent higher than at a few miles' distance. Eighteenpence a day may be reckoned the common price of labor in London and its neighborhood. At a few miles' distance it falls to fourteen and fifteen pence. Tenpence may be reckoned its price in Edinburgh and its neighborhoood. At a few miles' distance it falls to eightpence, the usual price of common labor through the greater part of the low country of Scotland, where it varies a good deal less than in England. Such a difference of prices, which it seems is not always sufficient to transport a man from one parish to another, would necessarily occasion so great a transportation of the most bulky commodities, not only from one parish to another, but from one end of the kingdom, almost from one end of the world to the other, as would soon reduce them more nearly to a level. After all that has been said of the levity and inconstancy of human nature, it appears evidently from experience that a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported. If the laboring poor, therefore, can maintain their families in those parts of the kingdom where the price of labor is lowest, they must be in affluence where it is highest.
Fourthly, the variations in the price of labor not only do not correspond either in place or time with those in the price of provisions, but they are frequently quite opposite. Grain, the food of the common people, is dearer in Scotland than in England, whence Scotland receives almost every year very large supplies. But English corn must be sold dearer in Scotland, the country to which it
