Of Territorial Wealth The riches proceeding from land should be the first to engage the attention of an economist or a legislator. They are the most necessary of all, because it is from the ground that our subsistence is derived; because they furnish the materials for every other kind of labour; and lastly, because, in preparation, they constantly employ the half, often much more than the half, of all the nation. The class of people who cultivate the ground are particularly valuable for bodily qualities fitted to make excellent soldiers, and for mental qualities fitted to make good citizens. The happiness of a rural population is also more easily provided for than that of a city population; the progress of this kind of wealth is more easily followed; and government is more culpable when it allows agriculture to decay, because it almost always lies in the power of government to make it flourish.
The annual revenue of land, or the annual crop, is decomposed, as we observed above, in the following manner. One part of the fruits, produced by labour, is destined to pay the proprietor for the assistance which the earth has given to the labour of men, and also for the interest of all the capital successively employed to improve the soil. This portion alone is called the net revenue. Another part of the fruits replaces what has been consumed in executing the labour to which the crop is due, the seed, and all the cultivator's advances. Economists call this portion the resumption. Another part remains for a profit to the person who directed the labours of the ground: it is proportionate to his industry and the capital advanced by him.
Government likewise takes a share of all those fruits, and by various imposts diminishes the proprietor's rent, the cultivator's profit, and the day-labourer's wages, in order to form a revenue for another class of persons. Nor do the fruits distributed among the workmen, the superintendent of the labour, and the proprietor, entirely remain with them in kind: after having kept a portion requisite for their subsistence, the whole then equally part with what remains, in exchange for objects produced by the industry of towns; and it is by means of this exchange, that all other classes of the nation are supplied with food.
The net revenue of territorial produce is considered to be that portion which remains with proprietors after the expenses of cultivation have been paid. Proprietors frequently imagine that a system of cultivation is the better, the higher those rents are: what concerns the nation, however, what should engage the economist's undivided attention, is the gross produce, or the total amount of the crop; by which subsistence is provided for the whole nation, and the comfort of all classes is secured. The former comprehends but the revenue of the rich and idle; the latter farther comprehends the revenue of all such as labour, or cause their capital to labour.
But a gradual increase of the gross produce may itself be the consequence of a state of suffering, - if the population, growing too numerous, can no longer find a sufficient recompense in the wages of labour, and if, struggling without protection against the proprietors of land, to whom limitation of number gives all the advantage of a monopoly, that population is reduced to purchase, by excessive labour, so small an augmentation of produce, as to leave it constantly depressed by want, There is no department of political economy which ought not to be judged in its relation to the happiness of the people in general; and a system of social order is always bad when the greater part of the population suffers under it.
Commercial wealth is augmented and distributed by exchange; and even the produce of the ground, so soon as it is gathered in, belongs likewise to commerce. Territorial wealth, on the other hand, is created by means of permanent contacts. With regard to it, the economist's attention should first be directed to the progress of cultivation: next to the mode in which the produce of the harvest is distributed among those who contribute to its growth; and lastly, to the nature of those rights which belong to the proprietors of land, and to the effects resulting from an alienation of their property.
The progress of social order, the additional security, the protection which government holds out to the rights of all, together with the increase of population, induce the cultivator to entrust to the ground, for a longer or shorter period, the labour which constitutes his wealth. In the timorous condition of barbarianism, he will not, at his own expense, increase the value of an immovable possession, which perhaps he may be forced to abandon at a moment's warning. But in the security of complete civilization, he regards his immovable possessions as more completely safe than any other kind of wealth. In the deserts of Arabia and Tartary; in the savannahs of America, before civilization has begun; in the pastures of the Campagna di Roma, or the Capitanata de la Pouille, after it has ended, men are contented with the natural fruits of the ground, with grass for their cattle to browse; and if those vast deserts yet retain any value, they owe it less to the slight labour by which the proprietor has inclosed them, than to the labour by which the herdsman has multiplied the oxen and sheep which feed upon them.
When the population of such deserts has begun to increase, and an agricultural life to succeed that of shepherds, men still abstain from committing to the ground any labour whose fruit they cannot gather till after many years have elapsed. The husbandman tills, to reap in the following season; the course of a twelvemonth is sufficient to give back all his advances. The earth which he has sown, far from gaining a durable value by his labour, is, for a time, impoverished by the fruits it has born.
