Note 2 — LETTER XXXVIII.

Yes, my good SS. Peter and Andrew!—very certainly I want to regulate prices; and very certainly I will, as to such things as I sell, or have the selling of. I should like to hear of anybody’s getting this letter for less than tenpence!—and if you will send me some fish to sell for you, perhaps I may even resolve that they shall be sold at twopence each, or else made manure of,—like these very costermongers; but the twopence shall go into your pockets—not mine; which you will find a very pleasant and complete difference in principle between his Grace the Costermonger and me; and, secondly, if I raise the price of a herring to twopence, it will be because I know that people have been in some way misusing them, or wasting them; and need to get fewer for a time; or will eat twopenny herrings at fashionable tables, (when they wouldn’t touch halfpenny ones,) and so give the servants no reason to turn up their noses at them.2 I may have twenty such good reasons for fixing the price of your fish; but not one of them will be his Grace the Costermonger’s. All that I want you to see is, not only the possibility of regulating prices, but the fact that they are now regulated, and regulated by rascals, while all the world is bleating out its folly about Supply and Demand.