The Political Economist and the Land. 1 1 7 



who was as much a physiocrat as a mercantilist, had said : 

 " Let any one consider what the difference is between an acre 

 of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or 

 barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common without 

 any husbandry upon it, and he will find that the improvement 

 of labour makes the far greater part of the value." " I think," 

 he says, " it will be a very modest computation to say that of 

 the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths 

 — nay, ninety-nine hundredths — are wholly to be put on the 

 account of labour." ^ Lastly, Hume had asserted that all real 

 power and riches consist of the national stock of labour. 



There are critics who have reproached Adam Smith with a 

 wilful attempt to ignore Quesnai's assertion that he had only 

 designed an economic system to meet the requirements of a 

 purely agricultural country. Smith, they allege, applied it to 

 our own commercial economy, found it naturally ill-suited, and 

 took pleasure in exposing its defects. "Without, however, thus 

 diving beneath the surface of his mind, we may with profit 

 examine the objections that he found to such an economy in 

 this busy island of shopkeepers. 



The French economists, we have said, had regarded agricul- 

 tural labour as alone productive. "Whatever wealth might 

 exactly be, they recognised that its prime source was the soil, 

 and that the labour of its cultivation was capable of producing 

 not only the means of its own support, but a surplus which 

 went to the increase of the existing stock. They imagined 

 that the labour expended on manufactures and commerce could 

 only augment the value of the raw material by the amount 

 necessary for its own wants whilst executing the work. The 

 landed proprietor, they rightly considered, was the first re- 

 cipient of the community's wealth ; in consequence, whatever 

 is consumed by those not possessed of landed property must 

 come directly from him, the primary owner. In this sense, 

 therefore, the circulation of wealth would only be a succession 

 of exchanges between two classes of mankind ; viz., the landed 

 proprietor who furnishes it, and the non-landed proprietor who 



* Essay on Civil Government, 1689. 



