ii8 History of the English Landed Interest. 



gives as its equivalent his labour and industry. They went on 

 to argue that, since taxation is that portion of a nation's wealth 

 applied to public uses, however distributed, it bears sooner or 

 later upon the landed proprietor; and therefore they proposed 

 that a system of direct taxation should replace the round- 

 about methods adopted at present. And indeed at first sight it 

 would have seemed preferable for the landed proprietor him- 

 self, if only to save the costs of middle men, both in the col- 

 lection of the imposts and in the conversion of raw material 

 into goods, to have borne directly the burden of all taxation 

 and labour. 1 



To one like Adam Smith, who resorted to a natural solution 

 of all economic difficulties, the very impracticability of the 

 idea warned him of its error. Though no friend of the land- 

 lord, he refused to plunder him thus of his produit net. 

 Though, like the physiocrats, prone to ascribe to agricultural 

 labour an undue importance, by attributing the ability of the 

 husbandman to make both rent and profit out of the soil to 

 the co-operation of nature (a process which he excluded from 

 all share in other industries), he was not prepared to half 

 neutralise the successful effects of his influence b}'' admitting 

 the principle of Vimpot vuique. That influence consisted in 

 impressing upon his disciples that the end and aim of the 

 economist was, not so much to find out how the national wealth 

 could be increased, as how the national labour could be en- 

 couraged and fully utilised. Mindful of the heresies of the 

 mercantile party, possibly suspecting their indirect influence in 

 the present dilemma, he stamps out their last effects bj'' explain- 

 ing the origin and uses of money. It was, he pointed out, the 

 natural result of a propensity which induces human nature to 

 truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. This pro- 

 cess introduced the idea of some common and convenient 

 medium of exchange, like the precious metals to which the 

 term money came to be applied. These pieces of metal were, 

 however, not the real price of anything, but merely represented 

 an equivalent for the toil and trouble of acquiring the article 



* Wealth of Nations, p. 39. Moasiour L. Gavaler's Preface to the 

 edition of 1809. 



