The Political Economist and the Land. 113 



ing the exportation of corn, tlie French Government had been 

 acting in a direction inimical to the best interests, not only of 

 the husbandman, but of the trader and manufacturer. He 

 and his school sought not so much to increase the State funds 

 as to lessen the poverty of the peasant. Their main object 

 was to raise the condition of human life, not to augment the 

 incomes of capitalists. They discovered that the earth was 

 the one source of wealth ; unfortunately they thought they had 

 also made out that labour was altogether incapable of producing 

 any new value except when employed in extracting the earth's 

 treasures. Quesnai admitted that manufacturers and mer- 

 chants were of considerable value to the community, but 

 he contended that as they realised no net surplus in the shape 

 of rent, they added to the raw material by their industry, 

 nothing beyond what is equivalent to the cost of converting it 

 into commodities, carrying it to market, and supporting them- 

 selves. The origin of the mistake was a wrong conception of 

 rent. Quesnai saw that only the cultivators of the land pay 

 rent, and imagined that agriculture was the only kind of 

 industry which yielded a net surplus over and above the ex- 

 penses of production. It might therefore be thought that he 

 would have made an exception to his great principle of free- 

 dom in allowing some form of protective legislation for the 

 agriculturist. But even here he would not submit to any 

 infringement of his universal precept, which was curtly but 

 fully expressed by the terms " laissez faire " and. " laissez 

 aller." 



One of the chief services rendered to mankind by Quesnai's 

 teaching was his discovery of the original source of all wealth. 

 No one except Nicholas Barbon, prior to Adam Smith, seems to 

 have been able to accurately define this expression, generally 

 because, as Mill has shown us, men confused the two terms 

 value and price. Quesnai imagined that the produce of the 

 soil was wealth before it had been rendered by human indus- 

 try a marketable commodity. Any one who had some faint 

 inkling of its signification described it as consisting of all the 

 material commodities which man may use to supply a want or 

 to procure an enjoyment either to his sensuality, his fanc}'', or his 



II. I 



