Life's Pleasures Quote by Joseph Hume

A coolly engineered piece of economic persuasion, Hume's line turns dinner-table reality into political leverage. He isn't lamenting cuisine; he's building a causal chain designed to corner lawmakers: if food is unusually expensive, wages must rise to keep workers alive; if wages rise, British labor becomes costlier than foreign labor; if labor is costlier, British industry loses. The word "consequently" does the heavy lifting, smuggling a policy conclusion into what sounds like an empirical observation.

The key is his choice of subject: not "the poor" in the sentimental register, but "the British artisan", a figure legible to Parliament as both productive and potentially volatile. Hume frames high food prices as an industrial handicap rather than a moral scandal. That's strategic. It recruits manufacturers and free-trade reformers by translating hunger into competitiveness, making repeal or reform (of tariffs, Corn Laws, protectionist barriers) sound like national self-defense.

Calling the disadvantage "in proportion" adds the scientist's pose: measurable, rational, uncontestable. Yet the subtext is sharp: Britain's governing class has engineered a system where landowners' interests are subsidized by workers' stomachs. Hume doesn't need to say "rent-seeking" or "class"; he lets the arithmetic imply the injustice.

Context matters: early 19th-century Britain is industrializing fast, while protectionist food policy keeps grain prices high and unrest simmering. Hume's intent is to shift the debate from tradition and entitlement to cost and consequence. It's an argument that flatters Parliament's self-image as practical, while quietly indicting it for making the nation's workforce pay a premium just to compete.