Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/245

, since it was not unlikely that, long before the time arrived at which all this could happen, they 'might all be transplanted from hence into America, and these countries be overrun with Turks, and made waste, as the seats of the famous Eastern Empires at this day are.' He was writing in the days of Mahomet IV., and the hard-won victory of Montecuculli at Saint Gothard, which saved Europe, took place in 1664, only two years after the appearance of the 'Treatise on Taxes.'

The second series of the Essays was largely devoted to a discussion of the calculations of the Parisian statistician, M. Auzout, and was published in the two languages, French and English, in parallel columns. Like the 'Treatise on Taxes,' these Essays and the Discourse contain many points of interest outside the immediate subjects with which they deal. The author addresses himself, for example, to the question of wages, and examines whether a high or a low rate of wages, in the then economic constitution of society, tended to increase production. His own observations of the habits of the clothworkers in England and of the Irish peasantry compelled him, however reluctantly, to the opinion that the general standard of living was as yet too low to make high daily wages of any advantage to the labourer, because of their tendency at once to reduce their hours and be content with wages just sufficient to support existence at a very low level of material civilisation. 'It was observed,' he says, 'by clothiers and others 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, so licentious are they who labour only to eat, or rather to drink.' It was the same in Ireland, especially since the introduction of that 'breadlike root, the potato. A day of two hours labour was there sufficient to make men to live after their present fashion, and the cheapness of food was the excuse for the people to live in a condition little above that of animals.' He argues that an