industry. Bread, wine and cloth, are things of daily use, and
great plenty; yet notwithstanding, acorns, water and leaves, or skins,
must be our bread, drink and cloathing, did not labour furnish us with
these more useful commodities: for whatever bread is more worth than
acorns, wine than water, and cloth or silk, than leaves, skins or moss,
that is wholly owing to labour and industry; the one of these being the
food and raiment which unassisted nature furnishes us with; the other,
provisions which our industry and pains prepare for us, which how much
they exceed the other in value, when any one hath computed, he will then
see how much labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things
we enjoy in this world: and the ground which produces the materials, is
scarce to be reckoned in, 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 shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of
dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the right employing of
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.

Sect. 43. 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 the 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. It is labour then which puts the greatest part
of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing:
it is 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 lies waste, is all
the effect of labour: for it is not barely the plough-man's pains, the
reaper's and thresher's toil