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"Well then,' says Sir Andrewwe go off with the prayers and good wishes of the beggars, and perhaps too our healths will be drunk at the next alehouse so all we shall be able to value ourselves upon is, that we have promoted the trade of the victualler and the excises of the government. But how few ounces of wool do we see upon the backs of these poor creatures? And when they shall next fall in our way, they will hardly be better dressed; they must always live in rags to look like objects of compassion. If their families too are such as they are represented, 'tis certain they cannot be better clothed, and must be a great deal worse fed. One would think potatoes should be all their bread, and their drink the pure element; and then what goodly customers are the farmers like to have for their wool, corn, and cattle? Such customers, and such a consumption, cannot choose but advance the landed interest, and hold up the rents of the gentlemen.

'But of all men living, we merchants, who live by buying and selling, ought never to encourage beggars. The goods which we export are indeed the product of the lands, but much the greatest part of their value is the labour of the people: but how much of these people's labour shall we export whilst we hire them to sit still? The very alms they receive from us, are the wages of idleness. I have often thought that no man should be permitted to take relief from the parish, or to ask it in the street, till he has first purchased as much as possible of his own livelihood by the labour of his own hands; and then the public ought only to be taxed to make good the deficiency. If this rule was strictly observed, we should see every where such a multitude of new labourers, as would, in all probability, reduce the prices of all our manufactures. It is the very life of merchandise to buy cheap and sell dear. The merchant ought to make his out-set as cheap as possible, that he may find the greater profit upon his returns; and nothing will enable him to do this like the reduction of the price of labour upon

all our manufactures. This too would be the ready way to increase the number of our foreign markets. The abatement of the price of the manufacture would pay for the carriage of it to more distant countries; and this consequence would be equally beneficial both to the landed and trading interests. As so great an addition of labouring hands would produce this happy consequence both to the merchant and the gentleman, our liberality to common beggars, and every other obstruction to the increase of labourers, must be equally pernicious to both.'

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Sir Andrew then went on to affirm, that the reduction of the prices of our manufactures by the addition of so many new hands, would be no inconvenience to any man: but observing I was something startled at the assertion, he made a short pause, and then resumed the discourse. It may seem,' says he,' a paradox, that the price of labour should be reduced without an abatement of wages, or that wages can be abated without any inconvenience to the labourer, and yet nothing is more certain than that both these things may happen. The wages of the labourers make the greatest part of the price of every thing that is useful; and if in propor tion with the wages the prices of all other things should be abated, every labourer with less wages would still be able to purchase as many necessaries of life; where then would be the inconvenience? But the price of labour may be reduced by the addition of more hands to a manufacture, and yet the wages

persons remain as high as ever. The admirable Sir William Petty has given examples of this in some of his writings; one of them as I remember, is that of a watch, which I shall endeavour to explain so as shall suit my present purpose. It is certain, that a single watch could not be made so cheap in proportion by only one man, as a hundred watches by a hundred; for as there is vast variety in the work, no one person could equally suit himself to all the parts of it; the manufacture would be tedious, and at last but clumsily performed. But if a

hundred watches were to be made by a hundred men, the cases may be assigned to one, the dials to another, the wheels to another, the springs to another, and every other part to a proper artist. As there would be no need of perplexing any one person with too much variety, every one would be able to perform his single part with greater skill and expedition; and the hundred watches would be finished in one-fourth part of the time of the first one, and every one of them at one-fourth part of the cost, though the wages of every man were equal. The reduction of the price of the manufacture would increase the demand of it, all the same hands would be still employed, and as well paid. The same rule will hold in the clothing, the shipping, and all other trades whatsoever. And thus an addition of hands to our manufactures will only reduce the price of them; the labourer will still have as 'much wages, and will consequently be enabled to purchase more conveniencies of life; so that every interest of the nation would receive a benefit from the increase of our working people.

'Besides, I see no occasion for this charity to common beggars, since every beggar is an inhabitant of a parish, and every parish is taxed to the maintenance of their own poor. For my own part, I cannot be mightily pleased with the laws which have done this, which have provided better to feed than employ the poor. We have a tradition from our forefathers, that after the first of those laws was made, they were insulted with that famous song:

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Hang sorrow, and cast away care,

The parish is bound to find us," &c.

And if we will be so good-natured as to maintain them without work, they can do no less in return than sing us The Merry Beggars.'

'What then? Am I against all acts of charity? God forbid! I know of no virtue in the gospel that is in more pathetic expressions recommended to our practice. "I was hungry and ye gave me no

meat, thirsty and ye gave me no drink, naked and ye clothed me not, a stranger and ye took me not in, sick and in prison and ye visited me not." Our blessed Saviour treats the exercise and neglect of charity towards a poor man, as the performance or breach of this duty towards himself. I shall endeavour to obey the will of my lord and master: and therefore if an industrious man shall submit to the hardest labour and coarsest fare, rather than endure the shame of taking relief from the parish, or asking it in the street, this is the hungry, the thirsty, the naked; and I ought to believe, if any man is come hither for shelter against persecution or oppression, this is the stranger, and I ought to take him in. If any countryman of our own is fallen into the hands of infidels, and lives in a state of miserable captivity, this is the man in prison, and I should contribute to his ransom. I ought to give to an hospital of invalids, to recover as many useful subjects as I can; but I shall bestow none of my bounties upon an alms-house of idle people; and for the same reason I shall not think it a reproach to me if I had withheld my charity from those common beggars. But we prescribe better rules than we are able to practise; we are ashamed not to give into the mistaken manners of our country: but at the same time, I cannot but think it a reproach worse than that of common swearing, that the idle and the abandoned are suffered, in the name of heaven and all that is sacred, to extort from Christian and tender minds a supply to a profligate way of life, that is always to be supported, but never relieved.'

MARTYN.

Z.

N° 233. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1711.

-Tanquam hæc sint nostri medicina furoris,
Aut Deus ille malis hominum mitescere discat.
VIRG. Ecl. x. ver. 60.

As if by these, my sufferings I could ease;
Or by my pains the God of Love appease.

DRYDEN.

3

I SHALL, in this paper, discharge myself of the promise I have made to the public*, by obliging them with a translation of the little Greek manuscript, which is said to have been a piece of those records that were preserved in the temple of Apollo, upon the promontory of Leucate. It is a short history of the Lover's Leap, and is inscribed, An account of persons, male and female, who offered up their vows in the temple of the Pythian Apollo in the fortysixth Olympiad, and leaped from the promontory of Leucate into the Ionian Sea, in order to cure themselves of the passion of love.

This account is very dry in many parts, as only mentioning the name of the lover who leaped, the person he leaped for, and relating in short, that he was either cured, or killed, or maimed by the fall. It indeed gives the names of so many who died by it, that it would have looked like a bill of mortality, had I translated it at full length; I have therefore made an abridgment of it, and only extracted such particular passages as have something extraordinary, either in the case, or the cure, or in the fate of the person who is mentioned in it. After this short preface, take the account as follows:

Battus, the son of Menalcus the Sicilian, leaped for Bombyca the musician: got rid of his passion with the loss of his right leg and arm, which were

broken in the fall.

Melissa, in love with Daphnis, very much bruised, but escaped with life.

* No 227.

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