commodity that some desire to sell, and that others desire to buy,
precisely as is the case with potatoes; but it has this disadvantage
when compared with any other commodity, that it is less easily
transferred from the place where it exists to that at which it is
needed, and that the loss resulting from _the absence of demand on the
spot_ is greater than in reference to _any other commodity
whatsoever_. The man who raises a hundred bushels of peaches, of which
only seventy are needed at home, can send the remainder to a distance
of a hundred or a thousand miles, and the loss he sustains is only
that which results from the fact that the price of the whole is
determined by what he can obtain for the surplus bushels, burdened as
they are with heavy cost of transportation, that he must lose; for the
man that _must_ go to a distant market must always pay the expense of
getting there. This is a heavy loss certainly, but it is trivial when
compared with that sustained by him who has labour to sell, because
_that_, like other very perishable commodities, cannot be carried to
another market, and _must be wasted_. If he has two spare hours a day
to sell, he finds that they waste themselves in the very act of
seeking a distant market, and his children may go in rags, or even
suffer from hunger, because of his inability to find a purchaser for
the only commodity he has to sell. So, too, with the man who has days,
weeks, or months of labour for which he desires to find a purchaser.
Unwilling to leave his wife and his children, to go to a distance, he
remains to be a constant weight upon the labour market, and must
continue so to remain until there shall arise increased competition
for the purchase of labour. It is within the knowledge of every one
who reads this, whether he be shoemaker, hatter, tailor, printer,
brickmaker, stonemason, or labourer, that a very few unemployed men in
his own pursuit keep down the wages of all shoemakers, all hatters,
all tailors, or printers; whereas, wages rise when there is a demand