and levels of employment. The ideal state, in the words of Sir William Temple, consisted of a `great multitude of people crowded into small compass of land, whereby all things necessary to life become dear, and all men who have possessions are induced to parsimony; but those who have none, are forced to industry and labour, or else to want'.(10)Such beliefs, of course, reflected the traditional values and priorities of the political and economic elites, but they were also composed of tenets which purportedly derived from the behaviour of the labouring and artisan masses themselves, namely a preference for leisure over work and income.(11) Manifestly, the views on wages, labour and work-effort propounded from the later seventeenth century amounted to much more than simple moralizing on the inherent laziness and viciousness of the lower orders.(12) Nor were they mere despairings over the existence of legions of involuntary unemployed and underemployed, the victims of the recurrent oscillations of the pre-industrial economy, in which production and employment were affected by the seasons, the weather, the state of the harvest, wars, embargoes, and so on. Nor yet were they simply commentaries on the irregular work habits and employment opportunities that produced the intense bouts of labour followed by periods of voluntary or enforced leisure that were so characteristic of the self-employed and out-worker in the early modern era. Still less, in this era of rising wages, can inadequate nutrition and the need for frequent periods of recuperation be seen as the prime cause of the increased desire for leisure which was reported.Continued from page 3From the complaints of employers, the judgements of justices, petitions to the crown and parliament, and from the great mass of writings by respectable and respected political economists, as well as partisan and polemical lobbyists, there emerges a broad consensus, avowedly based upon observation ra...
