Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke · Edmund Burke
XI.
It is not true that the rate of wages has not increased with the nominal price of provisions. I allow it has not fluctuated with that price, nor ought it; and the squires of Norfolk had dined when they gave it as their opinion, that it might or ought to rise and fall with the market of provisions. The rate of wages in truth has no DIRECT relation to that price. Labour is a commodity like every other, and rises or falls according to the demand. This is in the nature of things; however, the nature of things has provided for their necessities. Wages have been twice raised in my time: and they bear a full proportion or even a greater than formerly, to the medium of provision during the last bad cycle of twenty years. They bear a full proportion to the result of their labour. If we were wildly to attempt to force them beyond it, the stone which we had forced up the hill would only fall back upon them in a diminished demand, or what indeed is the far lesser evil, an aggravated price, of all the provisions which are the result of their manual toil. There is an implied contract, much stronger than any instrument or article of agreement between the labourer in any occupation and his employer--that the labour, so far as that labour is concerned, shall be sufficient to pay to the employer a profit on his capital, and a compensation for his risk; in a word, that the labour shall produce an advantage equal to the payment. Whatever is above that, is a direct TAX; and if the amount of that tax be left to the will and pleasure of another, it is an ARBITRARY TAX.
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