al horizons and love of leisure deemed to be that the proposition could be reversed to read: `the poor do not labour upon average above four days in a week unless provisions happen to be very dear'. The analysis was taken a stage further by Sir William Petty when he claimed that `it is observed by... [those] who employ great numbers of poor people, that when Corn is extremely plentiful, that the Labour of the poor is proportionately dear: And scarce to be had at all'.(16)Nor did the `evils' which were believed to flow from rising real incomes stop here. With money in their pockets and leisure at their disposal, we are told that the poor were able to engage in immoral or disruptive consumption and pastimes, and in lengthy and frequent sojourns in the alehouse, which in addition to drunkenness and debauchery were likely to promote conspiracy and sedition. Moreover, excess income was liable to be spent on imports which harmed the balance of trade, on the purchase of unsuitable items of dress and little `luxuries' which fed `a perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above them',(17) and on injurious practices, such as tea-drinking, which was wasteful of time and destructive of industry. By these means, it was argued, high wages not only fed through to higher costs and prices, and therefore to lost production and markets, but they also made the work-force insolent, undermined social order and encouraged sedition towards the state and dishonour towards God. With the prevalence of such reasoning and anxieties it is not difficult to appreciate why the sentiments of Josiah Tucker, who held that when `the price of labour is continually beat down ... [it is] greatly for the public good', should have found such widespread instinctive support from those who did not labour for their living.(18)Continued from page 4IIIThe fact that contemporary opinion in the later seventeenth cen...
