“But, my lady, we do not want so many physicians as ploughmen.”
“True; and it is therefore a very happy thing that fewer can be the one than the other. If we leave the rewards of labour to take their natural course, we shall find that there always turns up a larger quantity of the sort we want most, and a lesser quantity of the sort we want least. In profits, I suppose, Mrs. White, you find less variety than in wages. It is of wages, you know, that we have been talking since we began about the apothecary.”
“Why, my lady, there is a disagreeable and an agreeable way of making profits of stock; and there is, I am sure, much more risk in some cases than others.”
“Yes; but there is no consideration of the easiness or the difficulty of selling things, or of the trust put in the seller, as there is in the manufacture of the thing sold. A smuggler, or any other kind of speculator, may make more one month, and lose more the next, than the regular trader pretends to calculate; but, I fancy, if we were able to see into the affairs of all the people in this village, or in any town, we should find less difference in what people make from an equal amount of stock, than from an equal quantity of labour. Your rule, of double interest being fair profit, shows this.”
“Certainly, my lady; or there would not be steady sellers of so many kinds of stock. People would choose the most profitable; which they might do more easily in selling goods than making them. My husband shifts his labour, as I believe he told you, from one employment to another;—(well for him that he can!) And I should shift my little capital from one kind of goods to another, if there was any real and lasting difference in the profits they would bring. But I don’t find that crockery would bring higher profits than grocery, and so I go on being a grocer; and the butcher down the street finds he makes as much of his joints as I of my stuffs, one time with another; and if he did not, I suppose his wife would turn draper.—We all find means to live; though I am sorry to say our profits are lower than they were; and if all my good father said be true, they will be lower still ten years hence.”
“Is that the sexton?” inquired Letitia, seeing an old man pass with a large key in his hand. It was, and John White must be going to see if all was right in his lordship’s pew, as the sexton was evidently about to open the church. Letitia paid for her purchases and followed, as one of her objects was to see the church as well as the sexton. Several neighbours popped into Nanny’s shop before she had cleared her counter, to hear what the lady could have been saying and doing all this while. Nanny looked rather grand and mysterious, chiefly observing upon the comfort of having got somebody into the neighbourhood that one might speak to with some chance of being understood. She was a lady of sense and learning....
“Though she did not go to school to your father, Nanny.”
“If she did not, she went to school to somebody that taught her to respect what my father taught me, neighbour; and so far, there are some folks that might take a lesson from her.”
On this, the wink went round, and the neighbours dropped off, leaving Nanny to muse on what fancy could have possessed her husband to tread on her toes and twitch her gown when she spoke of the strolling players.