consists wholly in food, and still less, of course, in mere bread or
grain. In looking over that mine of information, for everything
relating to prices and labour, Sir Frederick Morton Eden's work on
the poor, I find, that in a labourer's family of about an average
size, the articles of house rent, fuel, soap, candles, tea, sugar,
and clothing, are generally equal to the articles of bread or meal.
On a very rough estimate, the whole may be divided into five parts,
of which two consist of meal or bread, two of the articles above
mentioned, and one of meat, milk, butter, cheese, and potatoes.
These divisions are, of course, subject to considerable variations,
arising from the number of the family, and the amount of the
earnings. But if they merely approximate towards the truth, a rise
in the price of corn must be both slow and partial in its effects
upon labour. Meat, milk, butter, cheese, and potatoes are slowly
affected by the price of corn; house rent, bricks, stone, timber,
fuel, soap, candles, and clothing, still more slowly; and, as far as
some of them depend, in part or in the whole, upon foreign materials
(as is the case with leather, linen, cottons, soap, and candles),
they may be considered as independent of it; like the two remaining
articles of tea and sugar, which are by no means unimportant in
their amount.

It is manifest therefore that the whole of the wages of labour can
never rise and fall in proportion to the variations in the price of
grain. And that the effect produced by these variations, whatever
may be its amount, must be very slow in its operation, is proved by
the manner in which the supply of labour takes place; a point, which
has been by no means sufficiently attended to.

Every change in the prices of commodities, if left to find their