114 History of the English Landed Interest. 



vanity. Others distinguislied between public and private 

 wealth, assigning to the former a value in use, but no value in 

 exchange, and to the latter an exchangeable value, but no 

 value in use ; and such made public wealth to consist in the 

 exchangeable value of the net produce ; and whilst one authority 

 stated that it is whatever is superfluous, another had thought 

 that it consisted in the totality of the private property of 

 its individuals. The latter, indeed — viz., Sir "William Petty — 

 was on the right track in so far that he was following in the 

 footsteps of John Locke and Josiah Child, and appealing 

 to the teaching of nature as the apparently sole avenue of 

 escape from the artificial laws of an enslaving and perverted 

 civilisation. But by the end of the first half of the eigh- 

 teenth century, there was, as we have said, even in England 

 an occasional glimmer of the real truth. Hobbes had shown 

 that " the valuation of a Commonwealth consisteth in the 

 plenty and distribution of materials conducing to life." " As 

 for the plenty of matter," he says, " it is a thing limited by 

 nature to those commodities, which from the two breasts of 

 our common mother land and sea, God usually freely giveth 

 or for labour selleth to mankind." ^ 



AsgilP was even more graphic still when he maintained that 

 " what we call commodities is nothing but land severed from 

 the soil : man deals in nothing but earth." But the light shed 

 upon economic matters by the ideas of Hobbes, Asgill, Daven- 

 ant, Wallace, Stewart, Petty, etc. ; by the theories of the mer- 

 cantile system ; and by the doctrines of the French school, was 

 soon to be eclipsed by the rising of a far greater luminary in 

 the p'z'rson of Adam Smith. That his views did not bear im- 

 mediate fruit was rather owing to the bias created by the doc- 

 trines of the French E-evolutionists in the public mind against 



^ Leviathan, 1G51. ch. xxiv. " To my booksellers for Hobbes' Levia- 

 than, which is now mightily called for, and what was heretofore sold for 

 8.S. I now give 24s. at the second hand, and is sold for 30.s'., it being a 

 book the Bishop will not let be ] ri ited again." — Sept. 3, 16(JS, Pepys'' 

 Diary. 



* Sev(:rnl Assortions proved in nrdcr to create another SjJecies of Money 

 than Gold. John Asgill, M.P. (169 J). 



