So that, in so small a platoon as that of even five, you
will find the full complement of all that five men _can_ earn. Taking
five and five throughout the kingdom, they are equal: therefore an error
with regard to the equalization of their wages by those who employ five,
as farmers do at the very least, cannot be considerable.
Secondly, Those who are able to work, but not the complete task of a
day-laborer. This class is infinitely diversified, but will aptly enough
fall into principal divisions. _Men_, from the decline, which after
fifty becomes every year more sensible, to the period of debility and
decrepitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. _Women_,
whose employment on husbandry is but occasional, and who differ more in
effective labor one from another than men do, on account of gestation,
nursing, and domestic management, over and above the difference they
have in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining
life. _Children_, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to
greater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to
labor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visible
to those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into the
interior economy of a poor-house.
This inferior classification is introduced to show that laws prescribing
or magistrates exercising a very stiff and often inapplicable rule, or a
blind and rash discretion, never can provide the just proportions
between earning and salary, on the one hand, and nutriment on the other:
whereas interest, habit, and the tacit convention that arise from a
thousand nameless circumstances produce a _tact_ that regulates without
difficulty what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all.
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