Page:The wealth of nations, volume 3.djvu/289

 and spirituous liquors, though intended, perhaps, to fall upon the profits of the retailers, are likewise finally paid by the consumers of those liquors. Such taxes, though called by the same name, and levied by the same officers and in the same manner with the stamp duties above mentioned upon the transference of property, are however of a quite different nature, and fall upon quite different funds.

wages of the inferior classes of workmen, I have endeavored to show in the First Book, are everywhere necessarily regulated by two different circumstances; the demand for labor, and the ordinary or average price of provisions. The demand for labor, according as it happens to be either increasing, stationary, or declining; or to require an increasing, stationary, or declining population, regulates the subsistence of the laborer, and determines in what degree it shall be, either liberal, moderate, or scanty. The ordinary or average price of provisions determines the quantity of money which must be paid to the workman in order to enable him, one year with another, to purchase this liberal, moderate, or scanty subsistence. While the demand for labor and the price of provisions, therefore, remain the same, a direct tax upon the wages of labor can have no other effect than to raise them somewhat higher than the tax. Let us suppose, for example, that in a particular place the demand for labor and the price of provisions were such, as to render ten shillings a week the ordinary wages of labor; and that a tax of one-fifth, or four shillings in the pound, was imposed upon wages. If the demand for labor