particular.
A farm is truly a manufactory.
A field is a real tool, or in other words a stock of first materials.
All the laborious class is productive.
The truly sterile class is that of the idle.
Manufacturers fabricate, merchants transport. This is our industry. It consists in the production of utility.
CHAPTER III.
Of the measure of Utility, or of Value.
Whatever contributes to augment our enjoyments and to diminish our sufferings, is useful to us.
We are frequently very unjust appreciators of the real utility of things.
But the measure of utility which, right or wrong, we ascribe to a thing is the sum of the sacrifices we are disposed to make to procure its possession.
This is what is called the price of this thing, it is its real value in relation to riches.
The mean then of enriching ourselves is to devote ourselves to that species of labour which is most dearly paid for, whatever be its nature. This is true as to a nation as well as to an individual.
Observe always that the conventional value, the market price of a thing, being determined by the balance of the resistance of sellers and buyers, a thing without being less desired becomes less dear, when it is more easily produced.
This is the great advantage of the progress of the arts. It causes us to be provided for on better terms, because we are so with less trouble.
CHAPTER IV.
Of the change of form, or of manufacturing Industry, comprising Agriculture.
In every species of industry there are three things: theory, application and execution.
Hence three kinds of labourers; the man of science, the entrepreneur, and the workman.
All are obliged to expend more or less before they can receive, and especially the entrepreneur.
These advances are furnished by anterior economies, and are called capitals.
The man of science and the workman are regularly compensated by the entrepreneur; but he has no benefit but in proportion to the success of his manufacturing.
It is indispensable that the labors most necessary should be the most moderately recompensed.
This is true most especially of those relative to agricultural industry.
This has moreover the inconvenience that the agricultural entrepreneur cannot make up for the mediocrity of his profits by the great extension of his business.
Accordingly this profession has no attractions for the rich.
The proprietors of land who do not cultivate it are strangers to agricultural industry. They are merely lenders of funds.
They dispose of them according to the convenience of those whom they can engage to labor them.
There are four sorts of entrepreneurs; two with greater or smaller means, the lessees of great and small farms; and two almost without means, those who farm as sharecroppers and labourers.
Hence four species of cultivation essentially different.
The division into great and small culture is insufficient and subject to ambiguity.
Agriculture then is the first of arts in relation to necessity, but not in regard to riches.
It is because our means of subsistence and our means of existence are two very different things, and we are wrong to confound them.
CHAPTER V.
Of the change of place, or of Commercial Industry.
The isolated man might manufacture but could not trade.
For commerce and society are one and the same thing.
It alone animates industry.
It unites in the first place inhabitants of the same canton. Then the different cantons of the same country, and finally different nations.
The greatest advantage of external commerce, the only one meriting attention, is its giving a greater development to that which is internal.
Merchants, properly so called, facilitate commerce, but it exists before them and without them.
They give a new value to things by effecting a change of place, as manufacturers do by a change of form.
It is from this increase of value that they derive their profits.
Commercial industry presents the same phenomena as manufacturing industry; in it are likewise theory, application and execution. Men of science, entrepreneurs and workmen; these are compensated in like manner; they have analogous functions and interests, &c. &c.
CHAPTER VI.
Of Money.
Commerce can and does exist to a certain degree without money.
The values of all those things, which have any, serve as a reciprocal measure.
The precious metals, which are one of those things, become soon their common measure, because they have many advantages for this purpose.
However they are not yet money. It is the impression of the sovereign which gives this quality to a piece of metal, in establishing its weight and its fineness.
Silver money is the only true common measure.
The proportion of gold and silver vary according to times and places.
Copper money is a false money, useful only for small change.
It is to be desired that coins had never borne other names than those of their weight; and that the arbitrary denominations, called monies of account, such as livres, sous, deniers, &c. &c. had never been used.
But when these denominations are admitted and employed in transactions, to diminish the quantity of metal to which they answer, by an alteration of the real coins, is to steal.
And it is a theft which injures even him who commits it.
A theft of greater magnitude, and still more ruinous, is the making of paper money.
It is greater, because in this money there is absolutely no real value.
It is more ruinous, because by its gradual depreciation, during all the time of its existence, it produces the effect which would
