National health : abridged from The health of nations : a review of the works of Sir Edwin Chadwick / by Benjamin Ward Richardson.

  • Chadwick, Edwin, 1800-1890.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: National health : abridged from The health of nations : a review of the works of Sir Edwin Chadwick / by Benjamin Ward Richardson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    354/364 (page 314)
    Adam Smith states that the wages for adult workers at that period were eightpence a day. The wages now in Lancashire average 175. per head of the mill workers, and in a cottage of three—man, woman, and child—the wages may amount to £2 10s. per w^eek. The agricultural wages in the highly cultivated dis- tricts in Scotland are now ahout £1 a week for the man, six shillings for the woman, and four shillings for the boy, besides a good cottage and other advantages. Now it may be stated as an economical principle that the fact of an artisan being employed at wages denotes that over and above his own means of subsist- ence he earns enough to yield a profit to the capitaUst who employs him; and the continued advance of wages denotes a continued diminution of the pressure of that population on the means of subsistence. And this has been going on, as in Lancashire, with the increasing introduction of labour-saving machinery. It has been stated, in support of the Malthusian theory, that the poorest classes in all European coun- tries have been continually underfed because of the con- stant tendency of reproduction to go on faster than food can be procured at home or purchased from abroad. Speaking of this country, the evidence is of injurious over-feeding. In the prisons, with the dietaries of the lowest cost, almost entirely vegetarian, there has been the highest amount of health beyond that enjoyed by the out-door population ; and how is the theory consistent with the fact of a drink-bill of upwards of ^100,000,000, chiefly injuriously expended by the wage class ?