§. 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
one in a year is worth five pounds, and 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
anything; 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 ploughman's pains, the reaper's and thresher's
toil, 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, oven, or any
other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its
sowing 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. It would 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.
