owever, the nature of things has provided for their necessities. Wages
have been twice raised in my time; and they hear a full proportion, or
even a greater than formerly, to the medium of provision during the
last bad cycle of twenty years. They bear a full proportion to the
result of their labor. If we were wildly to attempt to force them beyond
it, the stone which we had forced up the hill would only fall back upon
them in a diminished demand, or, what indeed is the far lesser evil, an
aggravated price of all the provisions which are the result of their
manual toil.

There is an implied contract, much stronger than any instrument or
article of agreement between the laborer in any occupation and his
employer,--that the labor, so far as that labor is concerned, shall be
sufficient to pay to the employer a profit on his capital and a
compensation for his risk: in a word, that the labor shall produce an
advantage equal to the payment. Whatever is above that is a direct
_tax_; and if the amount of that tax be left to the will and pleasure of
another, it is an _arbitrary tax_.

If I understand it rightly, the tax proposed on the farming interest of
this kingdom is to be levied at what is called the discretion of
justices of peace.

The questions arising on this scheme of arbitrary taxation are these:
Whether it is better to leave all dealing, in which there is no force or
fraud, collusion or combination, entirely to the persons mutually
concerned in the matter contracted for,--or to put the contract into the
hands of those who can have none or a very remote interest in it, and
little or no knowledge of the subject.

It might be imagined that there would be very little difficulty in
solving this question: for what man, of any degree of reflection, can
think that a want of interest in any subject, closely connected with a
want of skill in it, qualifies a person to intermeddle in any the least
affair,--much less in affairs that vitally concern the agriculture of
the kingdom, the first of all its concerns, and the foundation of all
its prosperity in every other matter by which that prosperity is
produced?

The vulgar error on this subject arises from a total confusion in the
very idea of things widely different in themselves,--those of
convention, and those of judicature. When a contract is making, it is a
matter of discretion and of interest between the parties. In that
intercourse, and in what is to arise from it, the