§ 3. Effect on Wages of the Competition of Persons having other Means of Support.

A modifying circumstance still remains to be noticed, which interferes to some extent with the operation of the principles thus far brought to view. While it is true, as a general rule, that the earnings of skilled labor, and especially of any labor which requires school education, are at a monopoly rate, from the impossibility, to the mass of the people, of obtaining that education, it is also true that the policy of nations, or the bounty of individuals, formerly did much to counteract the effect of this limitation of competition, by offering eleemosynary instruction to a much larger class of persons than could have obtained the same advantages by paying their price.

[Adam Smith has pointed out that] “whenever the law has attempted to regulate the wages of workmen, it has always been rather to lower them than to raise them. But the law has upon many occasions attempted to raise the wages of curates, and, for the dignity of the Church, to oblige the rectors of parishes to give them more than the wretched maintenance which they themselves might be willing to accept of. And in both cases the law seems to have been equally ineffectual, and has never been either able to raise [pg 211] the wages of curates or to sink those of laborers to the degree that was intended, because it has never been able to hinder either the one from being willing to accept of less than the legal allowance, on account of the indigence of their situation and the multitude of their competitors, or the other from receiving more, on account of the contrary competition of those who expected to derive either profit or pleasure from employing them.”

Although the highest pecuniary prizes of successful authorship are incomparably greater than at any former period, yet on any rational calculation of the chances, in the existing competition, scarcely any writer can hope to gain a living by books, and to do so by magazines and reviews becomes daily more difficult. It is only the more troublesome and disagreeable kinds of literary labor, and those which confer no personal celebrity, such as most of those connected with newspapers, or with the smaller periodicals, on which an educated person can now rely for subsistence. Of these, the remuneration is, on the whole, decidedly high; because, though exposed to the competition of what used to be called “poor scholars” (persons who have received a learned education from some public or private charity), they are exempt from that of amateurs, those who have other means of support being seldom candidates for such employments.

When an occupation is carried on chiefly by persons who derive the main portion of their subsistence from other sources, its remuneration may be lower almost to any extent than the wages of equally severe labor in other employments. The principal example of the kind is domestic manufactures. When spinning and knitting were carried on in every cottage, by families deriving their principal support from agriculture, the price at which their produce was sold (which constituted the remuneration of their labor) was often so low that there would have been required great perfection of machinery to undersell it. The amount of the remuneration in such a case depends chiefly upon whether the quantity of the commodity produced by this description of labor [pg 212] suffices to supply the whole of the demand. If it does not, and there is consequently a necessity for some laborers who devote themselves entirely to the employment, the price of the article must be sufficient to pay those laborers at the ordinary rate, and to reward, therefore, very handsomely the domestic producers. But if the demand is so limited that the domestic manufacture can do more than satisfy it, the price is naturally kept down to the lowest rate at which peasant families think it worth while to continue the production. Thus far, as to the remuneration of the subsidiary employment; but the effect to the laborers of having this additional resource is almost certain to be (unless peculiar counteracting causes intervene) a proportional diminution of the wages of their main occupation.

For the same reason it is found that, cæteris paribus, those trades are generally the worst paid in which the wife and children of the artisan aid in the work. The income which the habits of the class demand, and down to which they are almost sure to multiply, is made up in those trades by the earnings of the whole family, while in others the same income must be obtained by the labor of the man alone. It is even probable that their collective earnings will amount to a smaller sum than those of the man alone in other trades, because the prudential restraint on marriage is unusually weak when the only consequence immediately felt is an improvement of circumstances, the joint earnings of the two going further in their domestic economy after marriage than before.

This statement seems to be borne out by the statistics of wages176both in England and the United States. In our cotton-mills, where women do certain kinds of work equally well with men, the wages of the men are lower than in outside employments into which women can not enter.

Blacksmiths, per week: $16.74
Family of four: Drawers-in, cotton-mill—man, per week: $5.50
Family of four: Drawers-in, cotton-mill—woman, per week: $5.50
Family of four: Tenders, two boys: $4.50
Total: $15.50

[pg 213]

In this case the family of four all together receive only about the same as the wages of the single blacksmith alone.