Page:The cotton kingdom (Volume 2).djvu/256

 At this time I engaged a gardener, who had been boarding for a month or two in New York, and paying for his board and lodging $3 a week. I saw him at the dinner-table of his boarding house, and I knew that the table was better supplied with a variety of wholesome food, and was more attractive, than that of the majority of slaveowners with whom I have dined.

Amasa Walker, formerly Secretary of State in Massachusetts, is the authority for the following table, showing the average wages of a common (field-hand) labourer in Boston (where immigrants are constantly arriving, and where, consequently, there is often a necessity, from their ignorance and accidents, of charity, to provide for able bodied persons), and the prices of ten different articles of sustenance, at three different periods:—

-                           |    1836.     |   1840.   |  1843.                            |    Wages. |  Wages. | Wages. |$1.25 per day.|$1 per day.|$1 per day. ++-+-                           |   Dollars. | Dollars. | Dollars. 1 barrel flour           |     9.50     |    5.50   |    4.75 25 lbs. sugar, at 9c. |    2.25     |    2.00   |    1.62 10 gals. molasses, 42-1/2c.|    4.25     |    2.70   |    1.80 100 lbs. pork              |     4.50     |    8.50   |    5.00 14 lbs. coffee, 12-1/2c. |    1.75     |    1.50   |    5.00 28 lbs. rice              |     1.25     |    1.00   |      75 1 bushel corn meal       |       96     |      65   |      62 1 do rye meal            |     1.08     |      83   |      73 30 lbs. butter, 22c. |    6.60     |    4.80   |    4.20 20 lbs. cheese, 10c. |    2.00     |    1.60   |    1.40                            |+-+-                            |    44.00     |    28.98  |   22.00 -

This shows that in 1836 it required the labour of thirty-four and a half days to pay for the commodities mentioned; while in 1840 it required only the labour of twenty-nine days, and in 1843 that of only twenty-three and a half days to pay