world; and the ground that produces the materials is scarce. to be reckoned on as any, or, at most, but a very small part of it; so little, that even amongst us, land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as, indeed, it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing."

"This shows how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the right of employing 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."

"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 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. "Tis labour, then, which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would be scarcely worth anything; 'tis 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 is waste, is all the effect of labour. For 'tis not barely the ploughman's pains, the reaper's and thrasher's toils, 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, oxen,

or any other utensils, which are a vast number requisite to this corn, from its being seed 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. 'Twould be a strange catalogue of things that industry provided and made use of, about every loaf of bread, before it came to our use, if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dyeing, drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work, all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up."

"From all which it is evident, that though the things of nature are given in common, yet man being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of property; and that which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being, when invention and arts had improved the conveniences of life, was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others."*

Such is the close and ingenious method of reasoning employed by this profound investigator and thinker, in order to establish a necessary primary proposition, which is, the right inseparably annexed to the condition of man of appropriating by labour the materials which abound in the sphere of his habitation, which right, if it were not conceded and exercised, the presence of man upon earth would be a mere nullity, a contradiction of creation; for it would exhibit life given, but no means of sustaining life provided. But, then, this primary

Locke, on Civil Government, ch. v.

proposition, so well founded and so securely fortified by Locke, establishing, as it does, the right of appropriating the materials of nature by the instrumentality of labour, and so constituting and producing property, does not extend beyond the simple support of individual life. This primary proposition involves the simple course by which a man feeds, clothes, lodges, and delights himself; it comprehends this, but it comprehends no more than this. The writer having advanced so far, so successfully, should have advanced further. Emerging from the primary or simple, he should have entered upon the construction of the secondary or compound, proposition. Having, by a course of reasoning on the natural materials before him, established the right of man to appropriate by his labour the matter which the earth contains, which is the first proposition necessary to be established; he should, in the next place, have entered upon the construction of the expanded or enlarged proposition, involving a union of labour, and a conjunction of interests, arising from an agreement to exchange commodities when they shall have been procured by the instrumentality of labour; for this constitutes the fundamental premises from which all social interests are derived. If he had kept his attention directed to the course attendant on the interchange of commodities or the working of the division of labour, he would have discerned that he had not interpreted rightly the cause of value, for that value, in the great sense in which it obtains in all societies of men, cannot be imparted by labour alone; that it can be imparted only under the action of a conjunction of labour, that is, by the operation of the law of demand, or the fact of taking in exchange the surplus productions of labour, that portion of production which he who has laboured for it, and procured it, does not require for his own use or consumption. It is by this secondary and compound pro

position that the whole truth of social science, connected with the physical condition and enjoyments of man, is first opened to us, to be expanded afterwards through a consecutive series of illimitable amount, comprehending the whole range of human dealing; the aggregate capital of individuals and nations.

:

It is somewhat surprising that Locke was not induced to advance into the secondary proposition in which a reasoner on the condition of man becomes necessarily involved, or the great social course of action, to which I have just alluded, where he would have discovered that moral and material agency are indispensably blended, and that without such cooperative agency VALUE cannot be constituted. This pause and deficiency on the part of Locke are the more remarkable, inasmuch as in the very treatise from which I have quoted, he has referred to an argument by Hooker, where the principle of moral obligation, arising out of the union of man with man, is forcibly stated. The passage of Hooker's is as follows:- "The like natural inducement hath brought men to know that it is their duty no less to love others than themselves. For seeing these things that are equal must needs all have one measure, if I cannot but wish to excuse all good, even as much at every man's hand as any man can wish for unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire which is undoubtedly in other men, we all being of one and the same nature? To have anything offered them repugnant to this desire, must needs, in all respects, grieve them as much as me; so that, if I do harm, I must look to suffer, there being no reason that others should show greater measure of love to me, than they have by me showed unto them. My desire, therefore, to be loved of my equals in nature, as much as possible may be, imposeth upon

me a natural duty of bearing to themward the like affection. From which relation of equality between ourselves, and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and causes natural reason hath drawn for direction of life no man is ignorant; as namely, that because we would take no harm we must, therefore, do none."*

If Locke had permitted his mind to dwell with more especial power than he appears to have done, on the beautiful matter thus contributed by Hooker, and to which his observation was directed, and to have applied it to the subject then under his consideration, he would, in all probability, have acquired such an increased perception of the highest range of truth, as would have enabled his powerful mind to have elucidated fully the subject; for he could not have failed to have discerned how that by the all-pervading, irreversible, and everlasting law of the Creator, it is ordained, that all the material developments and appropriations of man shall be made in subordination of moral agency bad following bad - good following good.

was

The great and all-essential feature of social commercial science, on which I am now dilating,-which is, that value, or essential capital, is formed by the principle that is observed in the exchange of productions, and not by the quantity of production that may be educed by the industry and ability of man from the materials of the earth, equally undiscerned by Adam Smith as it was by Locke. The inquiring reader may ascertain this by an examination of the second chapter of the first book of "The Wealth of Nations." The error there admitted led the writer to adopt general or aggregate production as the end to be pursued, in place of general or aggregate value.

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, book 1, sect. 8.