DEPENDENCE OF THE ARTS. 291 



It seems appropriate in this place to consider agriculture 

 briefly with respect to its relative importance as a producer. 

 There are many departments of business which are not pro- 

 ducers at all in the proper sense of the term, and there are 

 many arts that are producers, but in a different sense from 

 that of agriculture, and ordinarily in a much less degree than 

 this. As to the first, it may be said that the person who 

 sells a lady's dress, or a chest of tea, and even he who sells 

 a house or a farm, does not produce anything ; the articles 

 merely change hands, and so does the money : there is no 

 more of the one or the other than before. So a merchant loads 

 his ship with goods and sends her to a foreign port, where the 

 cargo is disposed of, and payment made either in goods in 

 exchange or ill money at an advance upon the cost here. 

 Nothing really is produced by the operation ; there are no 

 more of the goods, if exchanged, on either side, or, if paid 

 for in money, there is no more of that than before. Things 

 have merely changed hands. These are not arts, but simply 

 transactions in certain business occupations. Real arts do 

 produce something to which a value is attached, and they thus 

 have a relative importance as producers. A man who makes 

 an axe-handle or a boat's oar utilizes the wood which he either 

 purchased or received as a gift from some one who probably 

 obtained it of the landholder. The ship-builder and the 

 house wright do a similar thing on a larger scale. So the 

 men who work in mints utilize the valuable ores drawn by 

 other hands from the mines, the river's brink or the quartz 

 beds. But the farmer grows corn and fruit where noth- 

 ing like corn or fruit existed before, with the exception of the 

 germinating and fertilizing elements as they existed uncom- 

 bined in the soil and in the atmosphere. 



The artist who paints a peach or a pear is dependent on the 

 grower for the original, and but for which he could not have 

 made the resemblance. So when he paints the flower or the 

 cluster of flowers. He does not make the original, and but 

 for the florist many of the most valuable kinds he never could 

 have to imitate. Indeed, for the beautiful landscape scene 

 which he pencils or paints, he is in great measure indebted to 

 the hand of cultivation. And let no one imagine that these 

 remarks are inappropriate in this connection, for the floral 



