Book I: Chapter 10 - Page 2

on in day-light, and above ground. Honour makes a great part
of the reward of all honourable professions. In point of pecuniary gain, all things considered,
they are generally under-recompensed, as I shall endeavour to shew by and by. Disgrace has
the contrary effect. The trade of a butcher is a brutal and an odious business ; but it is in most
places more profitable than the greater part of common trades. The most detestable of all
employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better
paid than any common trade whatever.

Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society,
become, in its advanced state, their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure
what they once followed from necessity. In the advanced state of society, therefore, they are
all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime. Fishermen
have been so since the time of Theocritus. {See Idyllium xxi.}. A poacher is everywhere a
very poor man in Great Britain. In countries where the rigour of the law suffers no poachers,
the licensed hunter is not in a much better condition. The natural taste for those employments
makes more people follow them, than can live comfortably by them; and the produce of their
labour, in proportion to its quantity, comes always too cheap to market, to afford any thing but
the most scanty subsistence to the labourers.

Disagreeableness and disgrace affect the profits of stock in the same manner as the wages of
labour. The keeper of an inn or tavern, who is never master of his own house, and who is
exposed to the brutality of every drunkard, exercises neither a very agreeable nor a very
creditable business. But there is scarce any common trade in which a small stock yields so
great a profit.

Secondly, the wages of labour vary with the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and
expense, of learning the business.

When any expensive machine is erected, the extraordinary work to be performed by it before
it is worn out, it must be expected, will replace the capital laid out upon it, with at least the
ordinary profits. A man educated at the expense of much labour and time to any of those
employments which require extraordinary dexterity and skill, may be compared to one of
those expensive machines. The work which he learns to perform, it must be expected, over
and above the usual wages of common labour, will replace to him the whole expense of his
education, with at least the ordinary profits of an equally valuable capital. It must do this too
in a reasonable time, regard being had to the very uncertain duration of human life, in the
same manner as to the more certain duration of the machine.

The difference between