2651페이지 중 191페이지

Tenpence may be reckoned its price in Edinburgh and its

neighbourhood. At a few miles distance, it falls to eightpence,

the usual price of common labour 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 man is, of all

sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported. If the

labouring poor, therefore, can maintain their families in those

parts of the kingdom where the price of labour is lowest, they

must be in affluence where it is highest.