connect the general good with their own
individual success.

But who are to judge what that profit and advantage ought to be?
Certainly no authority on earth. It is a matter of convention, dictated
by the reciprocal conveniences of the parties, and indeed by their
reciprocal necessities.--But if the farmer is excessively
avaricious?--Why, so much the better: the more he desires to increase
his gains, the more interested is he in the good condition of those upon
whose labor his gains must principally depend.

I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation, that this may
be true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer and
the laborer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at the
time of his health and vigor, and in ordinary times of abundance. But in
calamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, and
with the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of the
community, but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who produce
them, what is to be done? When a man cannot live and maintain his family
by the natural hire of his labor, ought it not to be raised by
authority?

On this head I must be allowed to submit what my opinions have ever
been, and somewhat at large.

And, first, I premise that labor is, as I have already intimated, a
commodity, and, as such, an article of trade. If I am right in this
notion, then labor must be subject to all the laws and principles of
trade, and not to regulations foreign to them, and that may be totally
inconsistent with those principles and those laws. When any commodity is
carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the
necessity of the purchaser, that raises the price. The extreme want of
the seller has rather (by the nature of things with which we shall in
vain contend) the direct contrary operation. If the goods at market are
beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. The
impossibility of the subsistence of a man who carries his labor to a
market is totally beside the question, in this way of viewing it. The
only question is, What is it worth to the buyer?

But if authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, what is this
in the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labor of ten or twelve
laboring men, and three or four handicrafts,--what is it but to make an
arbitrary division of his property among them?

The whole of his gains (I say it with the most