The contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.How little the fear of misfortune is then capable of balancing the hope of good luck appears still more evidently in the readiness of the common People to enlist as soldiers, or to go to sea, than in the eagerness of those of better fashion to enter into what are called the liberal professions.
What a common soldier may lose is obvious enough.Without regarding the danger, however, young volunteers never enlist so readily as at the beginning of a new war; and though they have scarce any chance of preferment, they figure to themselves, in their youthful fancies, a thousand occasions of acquiring honour and distinction which never occur.These romantic hopes make the whole price of their blood.Their pay is less than that of common labourers, and in actual service their fatigues are much greater.
The lottery of the sea is not altogether so disadvantageous as that of the army.The son of a creditable labourer or artificer may frequently go to sea with his father's consent; but if he enlists as a soldier, it is always without it.Other people see some chance of his making something by the one trade: nobody but himself sees any of his making anything by the other.The great admiral is less the object of public admiration than the great general, and the highest success in the sea service promises a less brilliant fortune and reputation than equal success in the land.The same difference runs through all the inferior degrees of preferment in both.By the rules of precedency a captain in the navy ranks with a colonel in the army; but he does not rank with him in the common estimation.As the great prizes in the lottery are less, the smaller ones must be more numerous.Common sailors, therefore, more frequently get some fortune and preferment than common soldiers; and the hope of those prizes is what principally recommends the trade.Though their skill and dexterity are much superior to that of almost any artificers, and though their whole life is one continual scene of hardship and danger, yet for all this dexterity and skill, for all those hardships and dangers, while they remain in the condition of common sailors, they receive scarce any other recompense but the pleasure of exercising the one and of surmounting the other.Their wages are not greater than those of common labourers at the port which regulates the rate of seamen's wages.As they are continually going from port to port, the monthly pay of those who sail from all the different ports of Great Britain is more nearly upon a level than that of any other workmen in those different places; and the rate of the port to and from which the greatest number sail, that is the port of London, regulates that of all the rest.At London the wages of the greater part of the different classes of workmen are about double those of the same classes at Edinburgh.But the sailors who sail from the port of London seldom earn above three or four shillings a month more than those who sail from the port of Leith, and the difference is frequently not so great.In time of peace, and in the merchant service, the London price is from a guinea to about seven-and-twenty shillings the calendar month.Acommon labourer in London, at the rate of nine or ten shillings a week, may earn in the calendar month from forty to five-and-forty shillings.The sailor, indeed, over and above his pay, is supplied with provisions.Their value, however, may not perhaps always exceed the difference between his pay and that of the common labourer; and though it sometimes should, the excess will not be clear gain to the sailor, because he cannot share it with his wife and family, whom he must maintain out of his wages at home.
The dangers and hairbreadth escapes of a life of adventures, instead of disheartening young people, seem frequently to recommend a trade to them.A tender mother, among the inferior ranks of people, is of afraid to send her son to school at a seaport town, lest the sight of the ships and the conversation and adventures of the sailors should entice him to go to sea.The distant prospect of hazards, from which we can hope to extricate ourselves by courage and address, is not disagreeable to us, and does not raise the wages of labour in any employment.It is otherwise with those in which courage and address can be of no avail.In trades which are known to be very unwholesome, the wages of labour are always remarkably high.Unwholesomeness is a species of disagreeableness, and its effects upon the wages of labour are to be ranked under that general head.
In all the different employments of stock, the ordinary rate of profit varies more or less with the certainty or uncertainty of the returns.These are in general less uncertain in the inland than in the foreign trade, and in some branches of foreign trade than in others; in the trade to North America, for example, than in that to Jamaica.The ordinary rate of profit always rises more or less with the risk.It does not, however, seem to rise in proportion to it, or so as to compensate it completely.
Bankruptcies are most frequent in the most hazardous trades.The most hazardous of all trades, that of a smuggler, though when the adventure succeeds it is likewise the most profitable, is the infallible road to bankruptcy.The presumptuous hope of success seems to act here as upon all other occasions, and to entice so many adventurers into those hazardous trades, that their competition reduces their profit below what is sufficient to compensate the risk.To compensate it completely, the common returns ought, over and above the ordinary profits of stock, not only to make up for all occasional losses, but to afford a surplus profit to the adventurers of the same nature with the profit of insurers.But if the common returns were sufficient for all this, bankruptcies would not be more frequent in these than in other trades.
