Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/201

 cheaper than they can anywhere be wrought upon the loom. They are the work of servants and laborers, who derive the principal part of their subsistence from some other employment. More than a thousand pair of Shetland stockings are annually imported into Leith, of which the price is from fivepence to sevenpence a pair. At Lerwick, the small capital of the Shetland Islands, tenpence a day, I have been assured, is a common price of common labor. In the same islands they knit worsted stockings to the value of a guinea a pair and upward.

The spinning of linen yarn is carried on in Scotland nearly in the same way as the knitting of stockings by servants who are chiefly hired for other purposes. They earn but a very scanty subsistence, who endeavor to get their whole livelihood by either of those trades. In most parts of Scotland she is a good spinner who can earn twenty pence a week.

In opulent countries the market is generally so extensive that any one trade is sufficient to employ the whole labor and stock of those who occupy it. Instances of people's living by one employment, and at the same time deriving some little advantage from another, occur chiefly in poor countries. The following instance, however, of something of the same kind is to be found in the capital of a very rich one. There is no city in Europe, I believe, in which house-rent is dearer than in London, and yet I know no capital in which a furnished apartment can be hired so cheap. Lodging is not only much cheaper in London than in Paris; it is much cheaper than in Edinburgh of the same degree of goodness; and what may seem extraordinary, the dearness of house-rent is the cause of the cheapness of lodging. The dearness of house-rent in London arises, not only from those