Chapter OF WAGES AND PROFIT IN THE DIFFERENT

CHAPTER X. OF WAGES AND PROFIT IN THE DIFFERENT EMPLOYMENTS OF LABOUR AND STOCK.

  The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments
  of labour and stock, must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly
  equal, or continually tending to equality. If, in the same neighbourhood,
  there was any employment evidently either more or less advantageous than
  the rest, so many people would crowd into it in the one case, and so many
  would desert it in the other, that its advantages would soon return to the
  level of other employments. This, at least, would be the case in a society
  where things were left to follow their natural course, where there was
  perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to choose
  what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought
  proper. Every man’s interest would prompt him to seek the advantageous,
  and to shun the disadvantageous employment.

  Pecuniary wages and profit, indeed, are everywhere in Europe extremely
  different, according to the different employments of labour and stock. But
  this difference arises, partly from certain circumstances in the
  employments themselves, which, either really, or at least in the
  imagination of men, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some, and
  counterbalance a great one in others, and partly from the policy of
  Europe, which nowhere leaves things at perfect liberty.

  The particular consideration of those circumstances, and of that policy,
  will divide this Chapter into two parts.