Page 193 of 2651

If the labouring poor, therefore, can maintain their families in

the one part of the united kingdom, they must be in affluence in

the other. Oatmeal, indeed, supplies the common people in

Scotland with the greatest and the best part of their food, which

is, in general, much inferior to that of their neighbours of the

same rank in England. This difference, however, in the mode of

their subsistence, is not the cause, but the effect, of the

difference in their wages; though, by a strange misapprehension,

I have frequently heard it represented as the cause. It is not

because one man keeps a coach, while his neighbour walks a-foot,

that the one is rich, and the other poor; but because the one is

rich, he keeps a coach, and because the other is poor, he walks

a-foot.