nor gout, nor penury, nor age, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate. and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful. Such as it was when, on the eve of great events he returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions and glowing with patriotic hopes-such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature-old, poor, sightless, and disgraced-he retired to his hovel to die!

Macaulay.

ADVANTAGES OF DISCUSSION.

Man is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and arguments; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story without comments to bring out their meaning. The strength and value, then, of human judgment depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. been his practice to listen to all that against him, to profit by as much of it and expound to himself, and upon other occasions to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a

Because it has has been said

as was just,

subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this, nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of collecting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers, knowing that he has sought for objection and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter, he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.

Mill.

ON WAGES.

Some labourers are paid higher than others. A carpenter earns more than a ploughman, and a watchmaker more than either; and yet this is not from the one working harder than the other. And it is the same with the labour of the mind as with that of the body. A banker's clerk, who has to work hard at keeping accounts, is not paid so high as a lawyer or a physician. You see, from this, that the rate of wages does not depend on the hardness of the labour, but on the value of the work done. But on what does the value of the work depend? The value of each kind of work is like the value of anything else; it is greater or less according to the limitation of the supply,- that is, the difficulty of procuring it. If there were no more expense, time, and trouble, in obtaining a pound of gold than a pound of copper, then gold would be of no more value than copper.

But why should the supply of watchmakers and surgeons be more limited than that of carpenters and ploughmen? That is, why is it more difficult to make a man a watchmaker than a ploughman? The chief reason is, that the education required costs a great deal more. A long time must be spent in learning the business of a watchmaker or a surgeon before a man can acquire enough skill to practise. So that, unless you have enough to support you all this time, and also to pay your master for teaching you the art, you cannot become a watchmaker or a surgeon. And no father would go to the expense of breeding up his son a surgeon or watchmaker, even though he could well afford it, if he did not expect him to earn more than a carpenter, whose education costs much less. But sometimes a father is disappointed in his expectation. If the son should turn out stupid, or idle, he would not acquire skill enough to maintain himself by his business; and then the expense of his education would be lost. For it is not the expensive education of a surgeon that causes him to be paid more for setting a man's leg than a carpenter is for mending the leg of a table; but the expensive education causes fewer people to become surgeons. It causes the supply of surgeons to be more limited, that is, confined to a few; and it is this limitation that is the cause of their being better paid. So that, you see, the value of each kind of labour is higher or lower, like that of all other things, according as the supply is limited. Natural genius will often have the same effect as the expensiveness of education, in causing one man to be better paid than another. For instance, one who has a natural genius for painting may become a very fine painter, though his education may not have cost more than that of an ordinary painter, and he will then earn, perhaps, ten times as much without working any harder at his picture than the other. But the cause why a man of natural genius is higher paid for his work than another is still the same. Men of genius are scarce; and their work, therefore, is of the more value, from their being

more limited in supply. Some kinds of labour, again, are higher paid from the supply of them being limited by other causes, and not by the cost of learning them, or the natural genius they require. Any occupation that is unhealthy, or dangerous, or disagreeable, is paid the higher on that account; because people would not otherwise engage in it. There is this kind of limitation in the supply of house-painters, miners, gunpowdermakers, and several others.

Some people fancy that it is unjust that one man should not earn as much as another who works no harder than himself. And there certainly would be a hardship if one man could force another to work for him at whatever wages he chose to pay. This is the case with those slaves who are forced to work, and are only supplied by their masters with food and other necessaries, like horses. So, also, it would be a hardship if I were to force any one to sell me anything, whether his labour, or his cloth, or cattle, or corn, at any price I might choose to fix. But there is no hardship in leaving all buyers and sellers free; the one to ask whatever price he may think fit; the other, to offer what he thinks the article worth. A labourer is a seller of labour; his employer is a buyer of labour, and both ought to be left free. If a man chooses to ask ever so high a price for his potatoes, or his corn, he is free to do so; but, then, it would be very hard that he should be allowed to force you to buy them at that price whether you would or not. In the same manner, an ordinary labourer may ask as high wages as he likes; but it would be very hard to oblige others to employ him at that rate whether they would or not. And so the labourer himself would think if the same rule were applied to him;-that is, if a tailor, and a carpenter, and a shoemaker could oblige him to employ them whether he wanted their articles or not, at whatever price they chose to fix.

In former times, laws used to be often made to fix the wages of labour. It was forbidden, under a penalty, that higher or lower wages should be asked or offered

for each kind of labour than what the law fixed. But laws of this kind were found never to do any good; for when the rate fixed by law for farm labourers, for instance, happened to be higher than it was worth a farmer's while to give for ordinary labourers, he turned off all his workmen except a few of the best hands, and employed those on the best land only; so that less corn was raised, and many persons were out of work who would have been glad to have it at a lower rate rather than earn notlting. Then, again, when the fixed rate was lower than it would answer for a farmer to give to the best workmen, some farmers would naturally try to get these into their service by paying them privately at a higher rate. And this they could easily do (so as to escape the law) by agreeing to supply them with corn at a reduced price, or in some such way; and then the other farmers were driven to do the same thing, that they might not lose all their best workmen. So that laws of this kind come to nothing.

Labourers often suffer great hardships, from which they might save themselves by looking forward beyond the present day. They are apt to complain of others when they ought rather to blame their own imprudence. If, when a man is earning good wages, he spends all, as fast as he gets it, in thoughtless intemperance, instead of laying by something against hard times, he may afterwards have to suffer great want when he is out of work, or when wages are lower. But then he must not blame others for this, but his own improvidence. So thought the bees in the following fable:

"A grasshopper, half-starved with cold and hunger at the approach of winter, came to a well-stored bee-hive, and humbly begged the bees to relieve his wants with a few drops of honey. One of the bees asked him how he had spent his time all the summer, and why he had not laid up a store of food like them?_"Truly," said he, "I spent my time very merrily in drinking, dancing, and singing, and never once thought of winter.' "Our plan is very different," said the bee; "we work hard in the summer to lay by a store of food against