Notes on the Maxims

(The land is the only source of wealth, and it is agriculture that multiplies it.)

Reciprocal trade with the foreigner brings back goods that are paid for out of the nation’s revenues, in money or in exchange; thus, in the detailed account of a kingdom’s revenues, it must not be made a separate item, which would be counting twice. The same must be thought of house rents and of interest on money; for these are, for those who pay them, expenses drawn from another source, except for annuities placed on land, which are secured on a productive fund; but these annuities are included in the product of the revenue of the land. Thus it is the land and the advances of the entrepreneurs of cultivation that are the only source of the revenues of agricultural nations.

(Let the tax not be destructive, etc.)

A well-ordered tax, that is, a tax that does not degenerate into spoliation through a bad form of imposition, must be regarded as a part of the revenue detached from the net product of the landed estates of an agricultural nation; for otherwise it would have no rule of proportion with the wealth of the nation, nor with the revenue, nor with the condition of the taxable subjects; it could imperceptibly ruin everything before the ministry noticed it.

The net product of landed estates is distributed among three proprietors: the State, the possessors of the land, and the tithe-owners. Only the portion of the possessor of the estate is alienable, and it is sold only in proportion to the revenue it produces. The possessor’s property therefore extends no further. It is therefore not he who pays the other proprietors who have a share in the estate, since their shares do not belong to him, he has not acquired them, and they are not alienable. The possessor of the estate must therefore not regard the ordinary tax as a charge laid on his portion; for it is not he who pays this revenue: it is the part of the estate that he has not acquired, and that does not belong to him, that pays it to whom it is due. And it is only in cases of necessity, in cases where the security of property would be endangered, that all the proprietors ought, for their own interest, to contribute out of their portions to the temporary subsidy that the pressing needs of the State may require.

But it must not be forgotten that in all cases the imposition of the tribute must bear only on the revenue, that is, on the annual net product of landed estates, and not on the advances of the husbandmen, nor on working men, nor on the sale of goods; for otherwise it would be destructive. On the advances of the husbandmen it would not be a tax, but a spoliation, which would extinguish reproduction, deteriorate the land, and ruin the farmers, the proprietors and the State. On the wages of working men and on the sale of goods it would be arbitrary; the costs of collection would exceed the tax, and would fall back without rule on the revenues of the nation and on those of the sovereign. Here the imposition must be distinguished from the tax: the imposition would be three times the tax, and would extend to the tax itself; for in all the expenditure of the State the duties laid on goods would be paid by the tax. Thus this tax would be deceptive and ruinous.

The imposition on working men who live by their wages is, strictly speaking, only an imposition on labour, which is paid by those who employ the workmen; just as an imposition on the horses that plough the land would really be only an imposition on the very expenses of cultivation. Thus the imposition on men, and not on the revenue, would bear on the very costs of industry and agriculture, would fall back doubly as a loss on the revenue of landed estates, and would lead rapidly to the destruction of the tax. The same must be thought of duties laid on goods; for they too would fall as a pure loss on the revenue, on the tax and on the expenses of cultivation, and would require immense costs that it would be impossible to avoid in a great State.

Yet this kind of imposition is of necessity the resource of small maritime States, which subsist by a carrying trade, necessarily subject to the tax in these States, which have no territory. And it is still almost always regarded as a temporary resource in great States, when agriculture has fallen there into such a decline that the revenue of the territory could no longer meet the payment of the tax. But then this insidious resource is a surcharge that reduces the people to a forced saving on consumption, stops work, extinguishes reproduction, and completes the ruin of the subjects and the sovereign.

There has often been talk of establishing a tax paid in kind out of the harvest, in the form of a tithe. This kind of imposition would indeed be proportional to the total product of the harvest, costs included; but it would bear no relation to the net product: the more middling the land and the weaker the harvest, the more burdensome, unjust and disastrous it would be.

The tax must therefore be taken immediately from the net product of landed estates; for in whatever way it is imposed in a kingdom that draws its wealth from its territory, it is always paid by the landed estates. Thus the simplest form of imposition, the most regular, the most profitable to the State, and the least burdensome to the taxpayers, is the one established in proportion to the net product, and immediately at the source of the continually renascent wealth.

The simple establishment of the imposition at the source of the revenues, that is, on the net product of the land, which forms the revenue of the nation, becomes very difficult in a kingdom where, for want of advances, agriculture has fallen into ruin, or at least into such a degradation that it cannot lend itself to any fixed land survey proportioned to the qualities of the land, which is badly cultivated, and whose product, having become very small, is only in proportion to the wretched state of cultivation; for the improvement of cultivation that might result from a better administration would at once make the survey very irregular.

An imposition laid equally on the land, on its products, on men, on their labour, on goods, and on draught animals, would present a gradation of six equal impositions, laid one upon another, all bearing on one and the same base, and yet each paid separately, but which all together would furnish much less revenue to the sovereign than a simple real tax, laid solely and without costs on the net product, and equal in its proportion to that of the six impositions that might be regarded as real. This tax, indicated by the natural order, which would greatly increase the sovereign’s revenue, would nevertheless cost the nation and the State five times less than the six impositions so repeated, which would annihilate all the products of the territory, and would seem to exclude every means of returning to order. For impositions that are illusory for the sovereign and ruinous for the nation seem to vulgar minds more and more unavoidable as the decline of agriculture increases.

Yet one must at least begin by suppressing as soon as possible the arbitrary impositions laid on the farmers of land; otherwise this kind of ruinous imposition would end by annihilating the revenues of the kingdom entirely. The imposition on landed estates that is hardest to regulate is the one laid on small-scale cultivation, where there is no rent that can serve as a measure, where it is the proprietor himself who furnishes the advances, and where the net product is very small and very uncertain. This cultivation, which is carried on by métayers in the countries where the tax has destroyed the farmers, and which is the last resource of ruined agriculture, demands much care; for a somewhat burdensome tax carries off its advances and annihilates it entirely. One must therefore distinguish carefully between the lands reduced to this small-scale cultivation, which in proportion to the product are tilled at great cost and often without any profit, and those where large-scale cultivation is carried on by rich farmers, who assure the proprietors a fixed revenue that can serve as an exact rule for a proportional imposition: an imposition that must be paid by the proprietor, and not by the farmer, except by deduction from the rent, as happens naturally when the farmer is informed of the amount of the tax before he takes his lease. If the needs of the State require increases in it, they must be borne by the proprietors alone; for the government would contradict itself if it required the farmers to fulfil the engagements of their leases, while by the unforeseen tax with which it burdened them it made it impossible for them to fulfil those engagements. In all cases the payment of the tax must be guaranteed by the value of the landed estates themselves, and not by that of the working wealth of cultivation, which cannot without depredation be subjected to any public service other than that of bringing forth again the wealth of the nation and of the sovereign, and which must never be diverted from this natural and necessary employment. The proprietors, held to this rule by the government, would take care, for the security of their revenue and of the tax, to let their land only to rich farmers; this precaution would ensure the success of agriculture. The farmers, no longer anxious about the imposition during the course of their leases, would multiply; small-scale cultivation would gradually disappear; and the revenues of the proprietors and the tax would increase in proportion, through the growth of the products of the landed estates cultivated by rich husbandmen.

There is a nation that has known how to strengthen its power and secure its prosperity by exempting the plough from all imposition. The proprietors, themselves charged with the tax, bear temporary subsidies in time of war; but the labours of cultivation are not slowed by them, and the sale and the market value of landed estates are always assured by the freedom of the trade in home-grown produce. And so in this nation agriculture and the multiplication of livestock suffer no degradation during the longest and most costly wars: the proprietors find their lands well cultivated and well kept up when peace returns, and their great revenues well maintained and well assured. It is easy to see from this the difference there is between an exorbitant tax and a spoliating tax; for, through the form of the imposition, a tax may be spoliating without being exorbitant, or may be exorbitant without being spoliating.

(Let the advances of cultivation be sufficient.)

It must be noted that the most fertile land would be worth nothing without the wealth needed to meet the expenses of cultivation, and that the degradation of agriculture in a kingdom must be imputed not to the idleness of men but to their indigence. If the advances of cultivation yielded only a little net product, through an error of government, there would be great costs, little revenue, and a population consisting almost entirely of common people, occupied in the countryside, without profit to the State, in a bad cultivation that would keep them alive in misery.

Formerly, in a certain kingdom, the annual advances brought forth, taking one year with another, a net product of only about twenty-five per cent, the tax on the husbandman included, which was distributed to the tithe, to the tax and to the proprietor, after deduction of the husbandman’s annual returns. If the original advances had been sufficient, cultivation could easily have yielded there a hundred of net product, and even more, for a hundred of annual advances. Thus the nation suffered a deficit of at least four-fifths on the net product of its annual advances, without counting the loss on the employment and the revenue of the land, which itself made up for the costs of a poor cultivation, and which was left fallow by turns for several years to restore it and put it in a state to produce a small harvest. The greater part of the inhabitants were then in poverty, and without profit to the State. For as is the net product of the advances beyond the expenses, so also is the net product of the labour of the men who bring it forth: and as is the net product of the landed estates, so is the net product for the revenue, for the tax, and for the subsistence of the different classes of men of a nation. Thus the more insufficient the advances, the less profitable men and land are to the State. Husbandmen who subsist miserably on a thankless cultivation serve only to maintain, fruitlessly, the population of a poor nation.

In this kingdom the tax was laid almost entirely and arbitrarily on the farmers, on the workmen, and on goods. Thus it bore directly and indirectly on the advances of the expenses of cultivation, which burdened the landed estates with about three hundred millions for the ordinary tax, and as much again for the administration, the costs of collection, etc. And in the latest times the products of the soil yielded the nation, to judge by the returns of the tax of a tenth on productive property and by an examination of the product of the land, only about four hundred millions of net revenue, including the tithe and the other ecclesiastical revenues: a sad product from a great and excellent territory, and from a great and industrious population! The export of grain was forbidden; production was confined to the consumption of the nation; half the land lay fallow; the planting of vines on it was forbidden; the internal trade in grain was given over to an arbitrary police; sale was continually interrupted between the provinces, and the market value of commodities was always uncertain.

The advances of productive expenditure were carried off one after another by the arbitrary tax and by the indirect charges, to the annihilation of reproduction and of the tax itself; the husbandmen’s children abandoned the countryside; the surcharge of the tax on commodities raised their natural price, and added a burdensome excess of price to goods and to the cost of wages in the nation’s expenditure; and this again fell back as a loss on the farmers’ returns, on the net product of the landed estates, on the tax, on cultivation, etc. The spoliation caused by the part of the arbitrary tax laid on the farmers caused, besides, a progressive decline, which, joined to the want of freedom of trade, made the land fall into small-scale cultivation and fallow. It was at this degree of decay that the expenses of cultivation produced no more than 25 per cent, the land tax included; and even this was due only to the benefit of the large-scale cultivation that still existed in a quarter of the kingdom. We shall not follow here the rapid course of the progress of this decay: it is enough to calculate the effects of so many destructive causes, proceeding one from another, to foresee their fatal consequences.

All these disorders and all these abuses have been recognised, and the glory of repairing them was reserved for a more enlightened ministry. But the needs of the State and circumstances do not always lend themselves to the views that are formed for the reforms that good administration may require in political economy, although these reforms are very essential and very pressing for the common advantage of the sovereign and the nation.

(The fortunes that return into circulation.)

By the fortunes that return into circulation must be understood not simply the fortunes that are destroyed, but also the sterile or idle fortunes that become active, and that are employed, for example, in forming the advances of large enterprises of agriculture, of trade, and of profitable manufactures, or in improving landed estates whose revenues return every year into circulation. It is even by these active fortunes, well established, that a State has consistency, that it has great assured wealth for bringing forth great wealth again every year, for maintaining a population in comfort, and for ensuring the prosperity of the State and the power of the sovereign. But the same must not be thought of the pecuniary fortunes that are drawn from the interest of money and are not established on productive funds, nor of those that are employed in the purchase of useless offices, of privileges, etc.; their sterile circulation does not prevent them from being corroding fortunes, burdensome to the nation.

(Let sterile expenditure take its own course.)

The labours of manufacture and industry for the use of the nation are only an object of expense, and not a source of revenue. They can procure a profit in sales abroad only in countries where labour is cheap because of the low price of the commodities that serve for the workmen’s subsistence, a condition very disadvantageous to the product of landed estates; and so it ought not to exist in States that have the freedom and facility of a foreign trade that keeps up the sale and the price of home-grown produce, and that happily destroys the small profit that might be drawn from a foreign trade in manufactured goods whose gain would be founded on the loss resulting from the low price of the produce of landed estates. The net product, or revenue for the nation, is not confused here with the gain of the merchants and the entrepreneurs of manufactures; with respect to the nation, this gain must be put in the rank of costs. It would not be enough, for example, to have rich husbandmen, if the territory they cultivated produced only for themselves.

There are poor kingdoms where most of the luxury manufactures, too much multiplied, are upheld by exclusive privileges, and lay the nation under contribution by prohibitions that forbid it the use of other manufactured goods. These prohibitions, always prejudicial to the nation, are still more fatal when the spirit of monopoly and error that gave birth to them extends them even to the cultivation and trade of the produce of landed estates, where the most active competition is indispensably necessary to multiply the wealth of nations.

We shall not speak here of the carrying trade, which is the lot of small maritime States. A great State must not leave the plough to become a carrier. It will never be forgotten that a minister of the last century, dazzled by the trade of the Dutch and by the brilliance of luxury manufactures, threw his country into such a delirium that people talked of nothing but trade and money, without thinking of the true employment of money or of the true trade of the country.

This minister, so estimable for his good intentions, but too attached to his own ideas, sought to make wealth arise from the work of men’s fingers, to the prejudice of the very source of wealth, and disordered the whole economic constitution of an agricultural nation. The foreign trade in grain was stopped so that the manufacturer might live cheaply; the sale of wheat within the kingdom was given over to an arbitrary police, which interrupted trade between the provinces. The protectors of industry, the magistrates of the towns, in order to procure wheat at a low price, ruined their towns and their provinces by a bad calculation, imperceptibly degrading the cultivation of their lands. Everything tended to the destruction of the revenues of the landed estates, of manufactures, of trade and of industry, which in an agricultural nation can be upheld only by the products of the soil; for it is these products that furnish trade with the export of the surplus, and that pay the revenues to the proprietors and the wages of the men employed in lucrative labours. Various causes of the emigration of men and wealth hastened the progress of this destruction.

Men and money were diverted from agriculture and employed in manufactures of silk, of cotton, of foreign wools, to the prejudice of the manufactures of the country’s own wool and of the multiplication of flocks. Luxury of ornament was encouraged, and made very rapid progress. The administration of the provinces, pressed by the needs of the State, left no more security in the countryside for the visible employment of the wealth needed for the annual reproduction of wealth; which made a great part of the land fall into small-scale cultivation, into fallow, and into worthlessness. The revenues of the proprietors of landed estates were sacrificed, as a pure loss, to a mercantile trade that could not contribute to the tax. Agriculture, degraded and overwhelmed, was on the point of being unable to meet it; the tax was extended more and more to men, to food, to the trade in home-grown produce; it multiplied itself in the expenses of collection and in depredations destructive of reproduction; and it became the object of a system of finance that enriched the capital with the spoils of the provinces. The traffic in money at interest formed a principal kind of revenue, founded on money and drawn from money: which, with respect to the nation, was only an imaginary product, which escaped the tax and undermined the State. These revenues established on money, and the appearance of opulence, kept up by the magnificence of a ruinous luxury, imposed on the vulgar, and diminished more and more the reproduction of real wealth and the money stock of the nation. Alas! the causes of this general disorder were unhappily too long unknown: inde mali labes. But today the government holds to more enlightened principles; it knows the resources of the kingdom and the means of bringing abundance back to it.

(Let not the employment of money and men be extended to manufactures and the trade in luxuries, to the prejudice of the labours and the expenditure of agriculture.)

One should attach oneself only to the manufactures of goods whose raw materials one has, and which one can make at less expense than in other countries; and one must buy from the foreigner the manufactured goods that he can sell more cheaply than they would cost the nation if it had them made at home. By these purchases reciprocal trade is called forth; for if one wished to buy nothing and to sell everything, one would extinguish foreign trade and the advantages of the export of home-grown produce, which is infinitely more profitable than that of manufactured goods. An agricultural nation ought to encourage the active foreign trade in home-grown produce by the passive foreign trade in the manufactured goods that it can buy with profit from the foreigner. That is the whole mystery of trade: at this price let us not fear to be tributaries of other nations.

(Before everything, the kingdom must be well peopled with rich cultivators.)

The town of Godmanchester in England is famous in history for having accompanied its king with the most honourable of escorts, having brought a hundred and eighty ploughs to his passing. This display must seem very ridiculous to our townsmen, accustomed to frivolous decorations. One still sees stupidly vain men who do not know that it is the rich husbandmen, and the rich merchants attached to the rural trade, who animate agriculture, who have work carried out, who command, who govern, who are independent, who secure the revenues of the nation, who, after the proprietors distinguished by birth, by dignities, by learning, form the most honest, the most praiseworthy and the most important order of citizens in the State. Yet it is these honourable inhabitants of the countryside, these masters, these patriarchs, these rich entrepreneurs of agriculture, whom the townsman knows only by the disdainful name of peasants, and from whom he would even take away the schoolmasters who teach them to read, to write, to bring security and order into their affairs, and to extend their knowledge of the different parts of their calling.

These lessons, it is said, inspire them with vanity and make them litigious: should legal defence be permitted to these men of the soil, who dare to oppose resistance and haughtiness to those who, by the dignity of their residence in the city, ought to enjoy a particular distinction and a superiority that should overawe the villagers? Such are the ridiculous titles of the vanity of the townsman, who is only a mercenary paid by the wealth of the countryside. Omnium autem rerum ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agricultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius. Cicero, De Officiis. … Mea quidem sententia, haud scio an nulla beatior esse possit, neque solum officio, quod hominum generi universo cultura agrorum est salutaris; sed et delectatione, et saturitate, copiaque omnium rerum quae ad victum hominum, ad cultum etiam deorum pertinent. Idem, De Senectute.

Of all the means of gaining wealth, there is none better, more abundant, more agreeable, more suited to man, more worthy of a free man, than agriculture. … For my part, I do not know whether there can be any kind of life happier than this, not only for the usefulness of this employment, which makes the whole human race subsist, but also for the pleasure and the abundance it procures; for the cultivation of the land produces everything that can be desired for the life of men and for the worship of the gods.

(Draw wealth into the countryside, so as to extend large-scale cultivation and avoid small-scale cultivation.)

In large-scale cultivation one man alone drives a plough drawn by horses, which does as much work as three ploughs drawn by oxen and driven by six men. In the latter case, for want of original advances for the establishment of a large-scale cultivation, the annual expense is excessive in proportion to the net product, which is almost nil, and ten or twelve times more land is employed in it fruitlessly. The proprietors, lacking farmers able to meet the expense of a good cultivation, make the advances at the expense of the land, almost entirely as a pure loss; the product of the meadows is consumed during the winter by the plough-oxen, and a part of the land is left to them for their pasture in summer; the net product of the harvest comes so near to worthlessness that the least imposition makes people give up these remnants of cultivation, which in many places even happens quite simply through the poverty of the inhabitants.

It is said that there is a poor nation reduced to this small-scale cultivation in three-quarters of its territory, and that in this nation, besides, more than a third of the cultivable land lies worthless. But the government is occupied in stopping the progress of this degradation and in providing the means of repairing it.

(Do not favour monopoly in cultivation, and leave each man free to give his field the cultivation that suits it.)

Particular views had for a time made people believe that the cultivation of vines in France ought to be restricted in order to increase the cultivation of wheat, at the very time when the foreign trade in wheat was prohibited, when even the communication of the grain trade between the provinces of the kingdom was prevented, when the greater part of the land lay fallow because the cultivation of wheat there was limited to the internal consumption of each province of the kingdom, and when the destruction of the vines was increasing the fallows more and more. Provinces far from the capital were, besides, obliged to make representations against the increase of the cultivation of grain, which, for want of sale, fell into worthlessness in their country, causing the ruin of the proprietors and the farmers and annihilating the tax with which the land was charged. Everything therefore conspired to the degradation of the two principal cultivations of the kingdom and to the destruction, more and more, of the value of landed estates; one part of the proprietors of land was aiming, to the prejudice of the others, at an exclusive privilege of cultivation: the fatal effects of the prohibitions and restraints on the trade in the produce of landed estates, in a kingdom whose provinces communicate by rivers and seas, where the capital and all the other towns can easily be supplied with the produce of every part of the territory, and where the facility of export assures an outlet for the surplus.

The cultivation of vines is the richest cultivation of the kingdom of France; for the net product of an arpent of vines, taking one with another, is about three times that of the best arpent of land cultivated in grain. It must be noted, moreover, that the costs included in the total product of the one cultivation and of the other are more advantageous in the cultivation of vines than in the cultivation of grain; because in the cultivation of vines the costs furnish, with profit, many more wages for men; because the expense on vine-props and casks is to the advantage of the sale of wood; and because the men occupied in the cultivation of vines are not employed in it at harvest time, when they are then of great help to the husbandmen in gathering the grain. Besides, this class of men paid for their labours by the land, by becoming very numerous, increases the sale of wheat and of wine and keeps up their market value, as cultivation extends and as the growth of cultivation increases wealth: for the increase of wealth increases population in all the classes of men of a nation, and this increase of population keeps up on every side the market value of the products of cultivation.

It must be borne in mind that the facility of a foreign trade in home-grown produce, freed from burdensome impositions, is a great advantage for a nation that has a great territory, where it can vary its cultivation to obtain from it different kinds of produce of good value, above all those that cannot grow in neighbouring nations. The sale of wine and brandies abroad, being for us a privileged trade that we owe to our territory and our climate, ought to be specially protected by the government; so it must not be subjected to multiplied impositions, which are a pure loss to the tax and too prejudicial to the sale of produce that is the object of a great foreign trade, capable of upholding the opulence of the kingdom. The tax must be pure and simple, assigned on the soil that produces this wealth; and in the adjustment of the general imposition, account must be taken of the kinds of produce whose sale abroad must be assured by a favourable price; for then the State is well compensated for the moderation of the tax on these parts by the advantageous influence of this trade on all the other sources of the kingdom’s wealth.

(After the advances of cultivation, it is the revenues and the tax that are the wealth of first necessity, and that assure the prosperity of the nation.)

In what the prosperity of an agricultural nation consists: in great advances, to perpetuate and increase the revenues and the tax; in a free and easy internal and foreign trade; in the enjoyment of the annual wealth of the landed estates; in ample money payments of the revenue and of the tax. Abundance of produce is obtained by great advances; consumption and trade keep up the sale and the market value of the produce; market value is the measure of the nation’s wealth; wealth regulates the tribute that can be imposed, and furnishes the money that pays it, which must circulate in trade, but which must not accumulate in a country to the prejudice of the use and consumption of the annual produce, which must perpetuate the true wealth there by reproduction and reciprocal trade.

Coined money is a wealth that is paid for by other wealth; it is for nations a pledge intermediate between sales and purchases; it no longer contributes to perpetuating the wealth of a State when it is kept out of circulation and no longer returns wealth for wealth: then the more it accumulated, the more it would cost in wealth that would not be renewed, and the more it would impoverish the nation. Money is therefore an active and really profitable wealth in a State only in so far as it continually returns wealth for wealth; because coin is in itself only a sterile wealth, which has no other usefulness in a nation than its employment in sales and purchases, and in the payments of the revenues and of the tax, which put it back into circulation; so that the same money serves by turns, and continually, for these payments and for its employment in trade.

And so the mass of the money stock of an agricultural nation is found to be only about equal to the net product, or annual revenue, of its landed estates; for in this proportion it is more than sufficient for the nation’s use; a greater quantity of coin would not be a useful wealth for the State. Although the tax is paid in money, it is not money that furnishes it; it is the wealth of the soil, which is born again every year: it is in this renascent wealth, and not, as the vulgar think, in the money stock of the nation, that the prosperity and strength of a State consist. One does not make up for the successive renewal of this wealth by the money stock; but the money stock is easily made up for in trade by written engagements, secured by the wealth that one possesses in the country and that is carried abroad. Greed for money is a lively passion in individuals, because they are greedy for the wealth that represents other wealth; but this sort of greed, which withdraws money from its employment, must not be the passion of the State. A great quantity of money is to be desired in a State only so far as it is proportioned to the revenue, and thereby marks a perpetually renascent opulence, whose enjoyment is effective and well assured. Such was, under Charles V, called the Wise, the abundance of money that followed the abundance of the other wealth of the kingdom. One may judge of it by the wealth detailed in the immense inventory of that prince, besides a reserve of 17 millions (nearly 300 millions in the present value of our money) that was found in his coffers; this great wealth is all the more remarkable because the States of the kings of France did not then include a third of the kingdom.

Money, then, is not the true wealth of a nation, the wealth that is consumed and continually reborn; for money does not beget money. A crown well employed may indeed bring forth a wealth of two crowns; but it is the production, and not the money, that has been multiplied; so money must not linger in sterile hands. It is therefore not as indifferent to the State as is believed whether money passes into the pocket of Peter or of Paul; for it is essential that it should not be taken away from him who employs it to the profit of the State. Strictly speaking, the money that has this employment in the nation has no owner; it belongs to the needs of the State, which make it circulate for the reproduction of the wealth that makes the nation subsist and furnishes the tribute to the sovereign.

This money must not be confused with the devouring finance that is trafficked in loans at interest and that evades the contribution that every annual revenue owes to the State. The money of need has, I say, with every individual a destination to which it decisively belongs: that which is destined for the present payment of the tax belongs to the tax; that which is destined for the need of some purchase belongs to that need; that which gives life to agriculture, trade and industry belongs to that employment; that which is destined to pay a debt fallen due or about to fall due belongs to that debt, etc., and not to him who possesses it: it is the nation’s money; no one ought to keep it back, because it belongs to no one. Yet it is this dispersed money that forms the principal mass of the money stock of a truly opulent kingdom, where it is always employed with profit for the State. People do not even hesitate to sell it at the same price that it cost, that is, to let it go abroad for purchases of goods that are needed; and the foreigner is not ignorant either of the advantages of this trade, in which the need of exchanges decides the employment of money in goods and of goods in money; for money and goods are wealth only by reason of their market value.

Money diverted and kept out of circulation is a small object, which is soon exhausted if loans are multiplied even a little; yet it is this idle money that deludes the common people; it is this that the vulgar regard as the wealth of the nation and as a great resource in the needs of a State, even of a great State, which in reality can be opulent only by the net product of the wealth that is born every year from its territory, and which, so to speak, makes money be born again by renewing it and continually quickening its circulation.

Besides, when a kingdom is rich and flourishing through the trade in its produce, it has, through its correspondents, wealth in other countries, and paper takes the place of money for it everywhere. The abundance and the sale of its produce therefore assure it everywhere the use of the money stock of other nations; and money is never lacking either, in a well-cultivated kingdom, to pay the sovereign and the proprietors the revenues furnished by the net product of the marketable commodities that are born again every year from the land. But although money is never lacking to pay these revenues, one must not be misled into believing that the tax can be laid on the circulation of money.

Money is a wealth that hides itself from sight. Tribute can be imposed only at the source of the disposable wealth, always renascent, visible and marketable. It is there that the revenues of the sovereign are born, and there that he can find, besides, assured resources in the pressing needs of the State. The views of the government must therefore not stop at money; they must reach further and fix themselves on the abundance and the market value of the produce of the land, so as to increase the revenues. It is in this part of the wealth, visible and annual, that the power of the State and the prosperity of the nation consist: it is this that fixes the subjects and attaches them to the soil. Money, industry, mercantile trade and the carrying trade form only an artificial and independent domain, which, without the produce of the soil, would constitute only a republican State: Constantinople itself, which has not that form of government, but which is reduced to the movable wealth of the carrying trade, has, in the midst of despotism, its spirit and its independence in its correspondence and in the free condition of its commercial wealth.

(Encourage the multiplication of livestock.)

This advantage is obtained by the sale, the employment and the use of wool within the kingdom, by a great consumption of meat, milk, butter, cheese, etc., above all by the consumption that the common people, who are the most numerous, ought to make: for it is only by reason of this consumption that livestock finds a sale and is multiplied, and it is the manure that the livestock furnishes to the land that procures abundant harvests, through the very multiplication of the livestock. This abundance of harvests and of livestock removes all fear of famine in a kingdom so fruitful in subsistence. The food that livestock furnishes to men there diminishes the consumption of wheat, and the nation can sell a greater quantity of it abroad and continually increase its wealth by the trade in so precious a produce. The comfort of the common people thus contributes essentially to the prosperity of the State.

The profit on livestock is merged with the profit on cultivation as regards the proprietor’s revenue, because the rent of a farm is fixed in proportion to the product it can yield through cultivation and through the feeding of livestock, in countries where the farmers’ advances are not exposed to being carried off by an arbitrary tax. But when the tax is laid on the farmer, the revenue of the land falls into decline, because the farmers dare not advance the purchase of livestock, for fear that this livestock, being a visible object, may bring a ruinous imposition upon them. Then, for want of a sufficient quantity of livestock to furnish manure to the land, cultivation declines, and the cost of working thin land absorbs the net product and destroys the revenue.

The profit on livestock contributes so much to the product of landed estates that the one is obtained by the other, and these two parts must not be separated in valuing the products of cultivation, reckoned from the revenue of the proprietors; for it is more by means of livestock that the net product furnishing the revenue and the tax is obtained than by the labour of men, which alone would scarcely return the cost of their subsistence. But great advances are needed for the purchase of livestock; that is why the government ought to draw wealth to the countryside rather than men: there will be no lack of men there if there is wealth; but without wealth everything there declines, the land falls into worthlessness, and the kingdom is without resources and without strength.

There must therefore be entire security for the visible employment of wealth in the cultivation of the land, and full freedom of trade in its produce. It is not the wealth that gives birth to wealth that ought to be charged with the tax. Besides, the farmers and their families ought to be exempt from all personal charges, to which inhabitants who are rich and necessary in their employment ought not to be subject, for fear that they may carry off to the towns the wealth they employ in agriculture, to enjoy there the prerogatives that an unenlightened government would grant there by preference to the mercenary townsman. Well-to-do townsmen, above all the retail dealers, who gain only from the public and whose too great number in the towns is burdensome to the nation, these townsmen, I say, would find for their children, in an agriculture protected and honoured, more solid and less servile establishments than in the towns; their wealth, brought back to the countryside, would fertilise the land, multiply wealth, and assure the prosperity and power of the State.

There is a remark to be made about the nobles who cultivate their estates in the country: there are many of them who do not own enough land for the employment of their ploughs or of their means, and there is then a loss on their expenses and on their employment. Would it disgrace the nobility to allow them to rent land in order to extend their cultivation and their occupations to the profit of the State, above all in a country where the burden of the tax (become dishonourable) would no longer be laid either on persons or on cultivators? Is it unbecoming for a duke and peer to rent a house in a town? The payment of a farm rent subjects no one to any dependence on anybody, any more than the payment for a coat, for an annuity, for a lodging, etc.; and, more than this, it must be noted that in agriculture the possessor of the land and the possessor of the advances of cultivation are both equally proprietors, and that in this respect the dignity is equal on both sides. The nobles, by extending their enterprises of cultivation, would contribute by this employment to the prosperity of the State, and they would find in it resources for supporting their expenses and those of their children in the military estate. At all times nobility and agriculture have been united. In free nations the renting of land, freed from arbitrary and personal impositions, is in itself a very indifferent matter; have the dues attached to estates, to which even the nobles are subject, ever degraded either nobility or agriculture?

(As the sale is, so is the reproduction.)

If the foreign trade in grain and in the other home-grown produce is stopped, agriculture is confined to the state of the population, instead of the population being extended by agriculture. The sale of home-grown produce abroad increases the revenue of landed estates; this increase of revenue increases the expenditure of the proprietors; this increase of expenditure draws men into the kingdom; this increase of population increases the consumption of home-grown produce; this increase of consumption, and the sale abroad, quicken on both sides the progress of agriculture, of population and of the revenues.

Through freedom and facility of foreign trade, of export and import, grain has a constantly more even price; for the most even price is the price current among trading nations. This trade at all times smooths out the annual inequality of the nations’ harvests, by carrying by turns to those that are in want the surplus of those that are in abundance, which everywhere and always brings produce and prices back to about the same level. That is why trading nations that have no land to sow have their bread as assured as those that cultivate great territories. The least advantage in price in a country attracts the goods, and equality is continually restored.

Now it is demonstrated that, independently of the sale abroad and of a higher price, mere constant equality of price increases the revenue of the land by more than a tenth; that it increases and secures the advances of cultivation; that it avoids the excessive dearths that diminish population; and that it prevents the gluts that make agriculture languish. Whereas the prohibition of foreign trade is the cause of the frequent want of necessaries; of a cultivation too narrowly measured to the needs of the nation making prices vary as much as good and bad years make harvests vary; of this limited cultivation leaving a great part of the land worthless and without revenue; of uncertainty of sale disquieting the farmers, stopping the expenses of cultivation, and lowering farm rents; and of this decline growing more and more, as the nation suffers from an insidious precaution that in the end ruins it entirely.

If, so as not to run short of grain, people took it into their heads to forbid its sale abroad, and also to prevent the merchants from filling their granaries in abundant years, which must make up for bad years — to prevent, I say, the multiplication of these free stores, where the competition of the merchants preserves from monopoly, procures the husbandmen a sale in abundance, and keeps up abundance in barren years — one would have to conclude, from the principles of an administration so timid and so foreign to an agricultural nation, which can enrich itself only by the sale of its produce, that the consumption of wheat in the country ought also to be restricted as far as possible, by reducing the food of the common people there to potatoes, buckwheat, acorns, etc.; and that by a foresight so misplaced and so ruinous one should prevent the carriage of wheat from the provinces where it abounds to those that are in dearth and to those that are ill-supplied. What abuses! what monopolies would this arbitrary and destructive police not give rise to! What would become of the cultivation of the land; what would become of the revenues, the tax, the wages of men, and the strength of the nation?

(A low price of home-grown produce would make trade disadvantageous to the nation.)

If, for example, one buys from abroad a certain quantity of goods for the value of one setier of wheat at a price of 20 livres, two setiers would be needed to pay for the same quantity of these goods if the government made the price of wheat fall to 10 livres.

(As the market value is, so is the revenue.)

In a State one must distinguish goods that have a use-value and no market value from wealth that has both a use-value and a market value. For example, the savages of Louisiana enjoyed many goods, such as water, wood, game, the fruits of the earth, etc., which were not wealth, because they had no market value. But since some branches of trade have been established between them and the French, the English, the Spaniards, etc., a part of these goods has acquired a market value and has become wealth. Thus the administration of a kingdom ought to aim at procuring for the nation, together, the greatest possible abundance of produce and the greatest possible market value, because with great wealth it procures by trade all the other things it may need, in the proportion suited to the state of its wealth.

(Cheapness of commodities is not advantageous to the common people.)

Dearness of wheat, for example, provided it is constant, in an agricultural kingdom, is more advantageous to the common people than a low price. The day’s wage of the labourer is settled quite naturally on the price of wheat, and is ordinarily the twentieth part of the price of a setier. On this footing, if the price of wheat were constantly twenty livres, the labourer would earn in the course of the year about 260 livres; he would spend 200 livres of it in wheat for himself and his family, and there would remain to him 60 livres for his other needs; if on the contrary the setier of wheat were worth only 10 livres, he would earn only 130 livres, he would spend 100 livres of it in wheat, and there would remain to him only 30 livres for his other needs. And so we see that the provinces where wheat is dear are much more populous than those where it is at a low price.

The same advantage holds for all the other classes of men: for the gain of the cultivators, for the revenue of the proprietors, for the tax, for the prosperity of the State; for then the product of the land amply compensates for the additional cost of wages and food. It is easy to convince oneself of this by calculating the expenses and the increases of the products.

(Let the comfort of the common people not be diminished.)

To authorise vexations upon the inhabitants of the countryside, the extortioners have put forward as a maxim that the peasants must be poor, to keep them from being idle. Disdainful townsmen have readily adopted this barbarous maxim, because they pay less attention to other, more decisive maxims, which are that the man who can save nothing works precisely only to earn enough to feed himself; and that, in general, every man who can save is industrious, because every man is greedy of wealth. The true cause of the idleness of the oppressed peasant is the too low price of wages, and the little employment there is in countries where restraints on the trade in produce make commodities fall into worthlessness, and where other causes have ruined agriculture. Vexations, the low price of commodities, and a gain insufficient to spur them to work make them idle, poachers, vagabonds and pillagers. Forced poverty is therefore not the means of making the peasants industrious: only the property and the assured enjoyment of their gain can give them courage and activity.

Ministers guided by sentiments of humanity, by a superior education, and by wider views reject with indignation the odious and destructive maxims that tend only to the devastation of the countryside; for they are not unaware that it is the wealth of the inhabitants of the countryside that brings forth the wealth of the nation. Poor peasants, poor kingdom.

(Great expenditure on the consumption of subsistence keeps up the good price of commodities and the reproduction of the revenues.)

What is remarked here, regarding great expenditure on the consumption of home-grown produce, applies to agricultural nations. But one must think otherwise of small trading nations that have no territory; for their interest obliges them to save on every kind of expenditure, so as to preserve and increase the fund of wealth necessary for their trade, and to trade at less cost than other nations, in order to secure the advantages of competition in purchases and sales abroad. These small trading nations must be regarded as the agents of the trade of great States, because it is more advantageous to the latter to trade through their intermediary than to take on themselves different branches of trade, which they would carry on at greater expense and from which they would draw less profit than by procuring at home a great competition of foreign merchants; for it is only by the greatest possible competition, open to all the traders of the world, that a nation can assure itself the best price and the most advantageous possible sale of the produce of its territory, and preserve itself from the monopoly of the merchants of the country.

(Be less attentive to the increase of population than to that of the revenues.)

The desire of all nations to be powerful in war, and ignorance of the means of making war, among which the vulgar consider only men, have made people think that the strength of States consists in a great population. It has not been sufficiently seen that to sustain a war there is not needed nearly so great a quantity of men as is believed at first sight; that very numerous armies must be, and ordinarily are, more fatal to the nation that exhausts itself to employ them than to the enemy they fight; and that the military part of a nation can neither subsist nor act except through the taxpaying part.

Some superficial minds suppose that the great wealth of a State is obtained by an abundance of men; but their opinion comes from forgetting that men can obtain and perpetuate wealth only by wealth, and only so far as there is a fitting proportion between men and wealth.

A nation always believes that it has not enough men; and it is not perceived that there are not enough wages to sustain a greater population, and that men without fortune are profitable in a country only so far as they find assured gains there for subsisting by their labour. In default of gains or wages, a part of the people of the countryside can indeed, to feed themselves, bring forth some produce of low price, which requires no great expense nor long labour, and whose harvest is not long in coming; but these men, this produce, and the land on which it grows are nothing to the State. To draw a revenue from the land, the labours of the countryside must yield a net product beyond the wages paid to the workmen; for it is this net product that makes the other classes of men necessary in a State subsist. This is what is not to be expected of poor men who till the land with their arms or with other insufficient means; for they can procure only their own subsistence, and must give up the cultivation of wheat, which demands too much time, too much labour and too much expense to be carried out by men destitute of means and reduced to drawing their food from the land by the labour of their arms alone.

It is not, therefore, to poor peasants that you ought to entrust the cultivation of your lands. It is animals that must plough and fertilise your fields: it is consumption, sale, and the facility and freedom of internal and foreign trade that assure the market value that forms your revenues. It is therefore rich men whom you must charge with the enterprises of the cultivation of the land and of the rural trade, to enrich yourselves, to enrich the State, to make inexhaustible wealth be born again, by which you may enjoy amply the products of the land and of the arts, maintain a rich defence against your enemies, and meet with opulence the expenses of public works for the conveniences of the nation, for the facility of the trade in your commodities, for the fortification of your frontiers, for the maintenance of a formidable navy, for the adornment of the kingdom, and for procuring to working men wages and gains that attract them and keep them in the kingdom. Thus the political government of agriculture and of the trade in its produce is the basis of the ministry of finance and of all the other parts of the administration of an agricultural nation.

Great armies are not enough to form a rich defence; the soldier must be well paid if he is to be well disciplined, well trained, vigorous, contented and courageous. War on land and at sea employs other means than the strength of men, and demands other expenses far more considerable than that of the soldiers’ subsistence. And so it is much less men than wealth that sustains war: for so long as one has wealth to pay men well, one does not lack men to replenish the armies. The more wealth a nation has for bringing forth wealth again every year, the fewer men this annual reproduction occupies, the more net product it yields, and the more men the government has at its disposal for the public service and public works; and the more wages there are to make them subsist, the more useful these men are to the State, through their employment and through their expenditure, which makes their pay return into circulation.

Battles won in which only men are killed, without causing other damage, weaken the enemy little if the wages of the men he has lost remain to him, and if they are sufficient to attract other men. An army of a hundred thousand well-paid men is an army of a million men; for every army to which pay attracts men cannot be destroyed: it is then for the soldiers to defend themselves courageously; it is they who have most to lose; for they will not lack successors well resolved to face the dangers of war. It is therefore wealth that upholds the honour of arms. The hero who wins battles, who takes towns, who acquires glory, and who is soonest exhausted, is not the conqueror. The historian who confines himself to the marvellous in his account of military exploits teaches posterity little about the outcome of the decisive events of wars if he leaves it ignorant of the state of the fundamental forces and of the policy of the nations whose history he writes; for it is in the permanent comfort of the taxpaying part of nations, and in patriotic virtues, that the permanent power of States consists.

The same must be thought of public works that facilitate the increase of wealth, such as the building of canals and the repair of roads, rivers, etc., which can be carried out only through the comfort of taxpayers able to meet these expenses without prejudice to the annual reproduction of the nation’s wealth: otherwise works so extensive, though very desirable, would be, through unregulated impositions or continual corvées, ruinous enterprises whose consequences would not be repaired by the usefulness of these forced and crushing labours; for the decline of a State is repaired with difficulty. Destructive causes, increasing more and more, make all the vigilance and all the efforts of the ministry useless when one sets oneself only to repress the effects and does not go back to the principle. This is well proved, for its own time, by the author of the book entitled Le Détail de la France sous Louis XIV, printed in 1699. This author traces the beginnings of the decay of the kingdom to the year 1660, and examines its progress up to the time when he published his book: he shows that the revenues of landed estates, which had been 700 millions (1,400 millions in our present money), had diminished by half from 1660 to 1699; he observes that it is not to the quantity of taxes but to the bad form of imposition and its disorders that this enormous degradation must be imputed. One must judge from this of the progress of this diminution through the continuation of the same kind of administration. The imposition became so disordered that under Louis XIV it rose to more than 750 millions, which brought into the royal treasury only 250 millions; which took from the taxpayers every year the enjoyment of 500 millions, without counting the annual degradation caused by the arbitrary taille laid on the farmers. The multiplied and ruinous impositions on every kind of expenditure extended, by being drawn back again, to the expenditure of the tax itself, to the detriment of the sovereign, for whom a great part of his revenues became illusory. And so it is remarked that by a better administration the tax could have been greatly increased in a very short time, and the subjects enriched, by abolishing these destructive impositions and by reviving the foreign trade in grain, wine, wool, linen, etc. But who would have dared to undertake such a reform in times when people had no idea of the economic government of an agricultural nation? It would then have been thought to overturn the pillars of the edifice.