This shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to
largeness of dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the
right employing of them, is the great art of government: and that
prince, who shall be so wise and godlike, as by established laws
of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest
industry of mankind, against the oppression of power and
narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard for his neighbours:
but this by the by. To return to the argument in hand,
Sec. 43. An acre of land, that bears here twenty bushels of
wheat, and another in America, which, with the same husbandry,
would do the like, are, without doubt, of the same natural
intrinsic value: but yet the benefit mankind receives from the
one in a year, is worth 5l. and from the other possibly not
worth a penny, if all the profit an Indian received from it were
to be valued, and sold here; at least, I may truly say, not one
thousandth. It is labour then which puts the greatest part of
value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth any
thing: it is to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful
products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of that acre of
wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as good land,
which lies waste, is all the effect of labour: for it is not
barely the plough-man's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil,
and the baker's sweat, is to be counted into the bread we eat;
the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought
the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed
about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a
vast number, requisite to this corn, from its being feed to be
sown to its being made bread, must all be charged on the
account of labour, and received as an effect of that: nature and
the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials, as in
themselves.
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