Important Observations

The expenditure made by the proprietors with the sterile class, which serves for the subsistence of that class, must not be confused with the expenditure that the proprietors make directly with the productive class, by themselves, by those who live at their table, and by the animals they feed; for this expenditure that the proprietors make with the productive class may be more profitable to agriculture than what they make with the sterile class.

Among the proprietors of the revenue there are a great number who are very rich and who consume the produce of the highest price; thus the mass of produce they consume is proportionally much less considerable than that which is consumed, at lower prices, in the other classes. The men who spend the revenue and who buy so dear must therefore also be proportionally much less numerous in comparison with the sum of their purchases. But their expenditure keeps up the price of the produce of the best quality, which by gradation maintains the good price of the other produce, to the advantage of the revenues of the territory.

It is not the same with the great expenditure that the proprietors may make with the sterile class, and this is what constitutes the difference between display in subsistence and the luxury of ornament. The effects of the first are not to be feared like those of the other.

He who buys a litron of green peas for 100 livres pays them to a cultivator, who employs them in the expenses of cultivation, to the advantage of the annual reproduction. He who buys a piece of gold lace for 100 livres pays it to a workman, who employs a part of it in buying back the raw material from abroad; only the other part, employed in purchases for his subsistence, returns to the productive class; and even this return is not as advantageous as the proprietor’s direct expenditure with the productive class would have been; for the workman does not buy produce of high price for his subsistence, and so does not contribute, as the proprietor does, to maintaining the value and the revenues of the good lands that have the property of producing choice commodities. As for what has gone in purchases abroad, if it comes back to the productive class, as in fact it does, at least in part, in nations where there is a reciprocal trade in produce, it is always burdened with the costs of trade, which cause a diminution in it and prevent this return from being complete.

The expenditure of mere consumption is expenditure that annihilates itself without return; it can be maintained only by the productive class, which, for its part, can suffice to itself: thus such expenditure, when it is not employed in reproduction, must be regarded as sterile expenditure, and even as harmful, or as expenditure of luxury, if it is superfluous and prejudicial to agriculture.

The greater part of the expenditure of the proprietors is at the least sterile expenditure; the only exceptions are what they spend on the preservation and improvement of their estates and on extending their cultivation. But since by natural right they are charged with the care of the management of their patrimony and with the expenses of its repair, they cannot be confused with the part of the population that forms the purely sterile class.

In the state of prosperity of a kingdom whose territory had been brought to its highest possible degree of cultivation, and of freedom and facility of trade, and where consequently the revenue of the proprietors could increase no further, they might spend half of it in purchases from the sterile class. But if the territory were not completely cultivated and improved, if roads were lacking, if there were rivers to be made navigable and canals to be dug for the carriage of produce, they ought to spare their expenditure with the sterile class, so as to increase, by the necessary expenditure, their revenues and their enjoyments as far as possible. Until they had achieved this, their superfluous expenditure with the sterile class would be expenditure of luxury, prejudicial to their opulence and to the prosperity of the nation; for everything that is disadvantageous to agriculture is prejudicial to the nation and to the State, and everything that favours agriculture is profitable to the State and to the nation. It is the necessity of the expenditure that the proprietors alone can make, for the increase of their wealth and for the general good of society, that makes the security of landed property an essential condition of the natural order of the government of empires.

Feudal policy once regarded this landed property as the foundation of the military strength of the lords; but it thought only of the property in the soil: hence so many bizarre customs and laws in the order of succession to landed estates, which still subsist in spite of the changes that have come about in the monarchy, while so little attention has been paid to the security of the property of the movable wealth needed for cultivation, which alone can make landed estates yield anything. It has not been sufficiently seen that the true foundation of the military strength of a kingdom is the prosperity of the nation itself.

Rome knew how to conquer and subjugate many nations, but it did not know how to govern. It despoiled the agricultural wealth of the countries subjected to its rule; from then on its military strength disappeared; the conquests that had enriched it were taken from it, and it found itself delivered up, defenceless, to the pillage and violence of the enemy.

In the regular order that we are following here, the whole sum of the purchases made every year by the proprietors and by the sterile class returns every year to the productive class, to pay the proprietors their revenue of two milliards each year, and to pay the productive class itself the interest on its original and annual advances.

Nothing could be withdrawn from this distribution of expenditure, to the disadvantage of agriculture, nor anything withdrawn from the cultivator’s returns, by any exaction or by any shackles on trade, without a decline in the annual reproduction of the nation’s wealth following, and a diminution of the population that is easy to demonstrate by calculation. Thus it is by the order of the distribution of expenditure, according as it returns to the productive class or is withdrawn from it, according as it increases its advances or diminishes them, according as it keeps up or lowers the price of produce, that the effects of the good or bad conduct of a nation can be calculated.

The sterile class can spend on the subsistence of its agents only about half of the two milliards it receives, because the other half is employed in purchases of raw materials for its works. Thus this class makes up only about a quarter of the nation.

We have observed that of the returns of three milliards of the productive class there is one milliard for the interest on the original and annual advances of this class, which is employed continually in the repair of these advances; thus there remain to this class only about two milliards for the expenditure of its own immediate agents, who are consequently about double the number of those of the sterile class; but each of them, with the help of the working animals, can bring forth there a reproduction that can make eight persons subsist, that is, his own family, which may be supposed to be of four persons, and another family of the same number of persons belonging to the sterile class or to the class of proprietors.

Whoever wishes to enter into a more detailed examination of the distribution of a nation’s expenditure will find it in the Philosophie rurale, chapter 7. It will be seen there that, besides the five milliards that form the nation’s portion here, there are other expenses: such are the costs of trade and the feeding of the working animals employed in cultivation. These expenses are not included in the distribution of expenditure represented in the Tableau; and, added to it, they bring the total value of the annual reproduction to six milliards three hundred and seventy millions.

But it is to be remarked in this regard that the costs of trade may increase to the nation’s disadvantage, or diminish to its profit, according as this part is or is not directed in contradiction to the natural order.

It has been supposed, in the account of expenditure that has just been set out, that the nation trades only with itself. Now there is no kingdom whose territory produces all the kinds of wealth suited to the enjoyment of its inhabitants; so that there must be a foreign trade, by which a nation sells part of its produce to the foreigner in order to buy from the foreigner the produce it needs. However, since it can buy from the foreigner only as much as it sells to the foreigner, the account of its expenditure must always conform to the reproduction that is born again every year from its territory. The calculations of this expenditure can therefore be regularly established on the quantity of this reproduction itself, setting aside all foreign trade, the details of which are indeterminate, incalculable and useless to inquire into: it is enough to note that, in the state of a free competition of foreign trade, there is only exchange of value for equal value, without loss or gain on either side.

As for the costs of carriage, the nation and the foreigner pay them on both sides, in their sales or in their purchases; and they form for the merchants a fund separate from that of the nation, because in the foreign trade of agricultural nations every trader is a foreigner with regard to the interests of these nations. Thus an agricultural and trading kingdom unites two nations distinct from one another: the one forms the constituent part of the society attached to the territory that furnishes the revenue, and the other is an extrinsic addition, which forms part of the general republic of foreign trade, employed and defrayed by the agricultural nations. The costs of this trade, though necessary, must be regarded as a burdensome expense, deducted from the revenue of the proprietors of the land; and so they must be freed from every monopoly and every surcharge, which would fall back disastrously on the revenues of the sovereigns and of the other proprietors.

In the state of free competition of foreign trade, the prices current among trading nations must be the basis of the calculation of the wealth and the annual expenditure of nations that have an easy and immune trade. Foreign trade is more or less extensive according to the diversity of the inhabitants’ consumption, and according as the produce is more or less varied. The more varied a kingdom’s produce, the fewer exports and imports there are, and the more the nation saves on the costs of foreign trade, which must nevertheless always be very free, rid of all restraints and exempt from all impositions, because it is only through the communication it keeps up between nations that the best possible price for the produce of the territory can be constantly assured in the home trade, and the greatest possible revenue for the sovereign and for the nation.

The same produce may be seen to pass several times through the hands of merchants and artisans; but it must be noted that these repetitions of sales and purchases, which multiply circulation fruitlessly, are only transpositions of goods and increases of costs, without production of wealth. The reckoning of the produce therefore comes down to its quantity and to the prices of its sales at first hand.

The more these prices are subject to the natural order, and the more constantly high they are, the more profitable they are also in the exchanges made with the foreigner, the more they animate agriculture, the more they sustain the value of the different produce of the territory, the more they increase the revenues of the sovereign and of the proprietors, the more also they increase the money of the nation and the mass of wages paid as the remuneration due to the labour or employment of those who are not the original possessors of the produce.

The use of these wages, well or ill distributed, contributes much to the prosperity or the degradation of a kingdom, to the regularity or the disorder of a nation’s morals, and to the increase or the diminution of its population. Men may be harassed in the countryside and drawn by luxury and pleasure into the capital, or else they may be evenly spread through the provinces. In the latter case they can keep consumption close to production; whereas in the other case they cannot avoid the great expenses of cartage, which make produce fall to a low price in the sales at first hand, and make the revenues of the territory, the mass of wages, and the population decrease.

The trade of the reseller may extend according to the activity and the means of the merchants; but that of an agricultural nation is regulated by the annual reproduction of its territory. The profits, in pure gain, of the native merchants must therefore not be confused with the wealth of the nation, since the latter cannot extend annually beyond the sale of the actual reproduction of its territory, subject to the current prices of the sales at first hand. The merchant tends to buy at the lowest price and to resell at the highest price possible, so as to extend his gain as far as possible at the nation’s expense: his particular interest and the interest of the nation are opposed. Not that the whole body of the merchants, and even each member of this immense body, has not, looking at the matter on a large scale and in its true extent, a very real interest in the produce being constantly sold at first hand at the highest price possible; for the higher the price at which it is sold, the more net product cultivation yields; the more net product cultivation yields, the more profitable it is; the more profitable cultivation is, the more it extends on every side; the more produce it brings forth, the more returns it furnishes for the cultivators, the more revenue for the sovereign, for the proprietors, for the tithe-owners, and the more wages for all the other orders of citizens; the more expenditure of every kind multiplies, the more objects, occasions and activity trade acquires, and consequently the more the total sum of the merchants’ gains increases, through the very effect of the competition which, in each particular circumstance, prevents these gains from being excessive, to the prejudice of the prices of produce. But there are very few merchants who look so far ahead, and still fewer who are capable of sacrificing a present gain to the certainty of these great future advantages. And so it is not the merchants, but the wants of the consumers and the means of satisfying them, that originally secure the prices of produce at the sale at first hand. Traders do not give rise to prices, nor to the possibility of trade; it is the possibility of trade and of the communication of prices that gives rise to traders.

We have said nothing of the mass of coined money that circulates in the trade of each nation, and which the vulgar regard as the true wealth of States, because with money, they say, one can buy everything one needs. But they do not ask themselves with what one can procure money; yet this wealth is not given for nothing; it costs the one who buys it as much as it is worth. It is trade that brings it to the nations that have no mines of gold or silver; but these nations themselves would have neither gold nor silver if they had nothing to pay for them with, and they will always have as much as they wish to buy, or as it suits them to buy, if they have produce to give in exchange.

I say as much as it suits them to buy; for money is not the wealth that men need for their enjoyment. It is the goods necessary to life and to the annual reproduction of these goods themselves that must be obtained. To convert produce into money in order to withdraw this money from the expenditure profitable to agriculture would be to diminish the annual reproduction of wealth by so much. The mass of money can increase in a nation only as far as this reproduction itself increases there; otherwise the increase of the mass of money could take place only to the prejudice of the annual reproduction of wealth. Now the decrease of this reproduction would necessarily, and soon, bring with it that of the mass of money and the impoverishment of the nation; whereas the mass of money may decrease in a nation without any decrease of wealth in that nation, because there are many ways of making up for money when one is rich and has an easy and free trade; but nothing can make up, without loss, for a want of annual reproduction of the wealth suited to the enjoyment of men. It must even be presumed that the money stock of a poor nation must be proportionally larger than that of a rich nation; for there remains to each of them only the sum it needs for its sales and purchases. Now among poor nations there is much more need of the intervention of money in trade; everything must be paid in ready money, because one cannot trust the promise of almost anybody. But among rich nations there are many men known to be rich, whose written promise is regarded as very safe and well guaranteed by their wealth; so that all considerable sales are made on credit, that is, through the intervention of sound paper, which makes up for money and greatly facilitates trade. It is therefore not by the greater or smaller quantity of money that the opulence of States should be judged: and so it is reckoned that a money stock equal to the revenue of the proprietors of the land is much more than sufficient for an agricultural nation in which circulation proceeds regularly and trade is carried on with confidence and full freedom.

As for the universal trading republic spread through the different countries, and as for the small purely trading nations, which are only parts of this immense republic and may be regarded as its capital cities, or, if you will, as its principal counting-houses, the mass of their coined money is proportioned to the extent of their trade of resale; they increase this mass as much as they can, by their profits and by their saving, to increase the fund of their trade; money is their own patrimony; the merchants employ it in their purchases only to draw it back with profit in their sales. They can therefore increase their money stock only at the expense of the nations with which they trade; it is always in reserve in their hands; it leaves their counting-houses and circulates only to return there with increase; thus this money cannot form part of the wealth of the agricultural nations, which are always confined to their reproduction, out of which they continually pay the merchants’ gains. These merchants, in whatever country they may live, are bound to different nations by their trade; it is their trade itself that is their fatherland and the depository of their wealth; they buy and sell where they reside and where they do not reside; the extent of the exercise of their profession has no determinate limits and no particular territory. Our merchants are also the merchants of other nations; the merchants of other nations are also our merchants; and both also trade among themselves. Thus the communication of their trade penetrates and extends everywhere, aiming always in the end at the money that trade itself brings to the nations and distributes among them, in accordance with prices subject to the natural order, which daily regulates the market values of produce. But agricultural nations have another point of view, more useful to them and more extensive: they must aim only at the greatest possible reproduction, so as to increase and perpetuate the wealth suited to the enjoyment of men; money is for them only a small intermediate wealth, which would disappear in a moment without reproduction.