tury and the first half of the eighteenth was virtually unanimous in purporting to observe a strong relationship between increasing reward and decreasing effort does not of itself prove, however, that such a relationship existed in practice. Eli Heckscher was convinced that it did not, and he argued in his monumental study of Mercantilism, first published in 1931, that higher wages were bound to produce greater willingness to work or greater skills since `the wage level was not an effect, but a cause of the size of the labour supply'. He found it `strange ... [that] the mercantilists sought the connection... in precisely the contrary direction'. For Heckscher, the errors of mercantilists stemmed in part from striving to invent a justification for `keeping down the mass of the people by poverty in order to make them better beasts of burden for the few', and in part from a failure to construct their system out of knowledge of the contemporary economic situation.(19) By so doing he roundly contradicted the pioneering work of Edgar Furniss, published twenty-six years earlier. After examining the evidence of the almost universal conviction that good times decreased the industry of the labourer, Furniss had concluded that `so many and so positive are the statements of this effect of high wages that we are compelled to admit their truth and conclude that the labour supply of England at this time did not increase but decreased as wages rose'.(20)Almost inevitably, the views of subsequent historians have tended to fall somewhere between these two extremes, but by a large majority they have veered far more towards Heckscher than towards Furniss. Despite a long and voluminous pedigree, which encompasses distant periods of history as well as developing economies in recent times, the failure of workers enduring relatively low standards of living to respond wholeheartedly to the stimulus of increased earnings is a subject which has usually been appro...
