17. Essential difference between the two laborious classes.
But there is this difference between the two species of
labour; that the work of the cultivator produces not only his own
wages, but also that revenue which serves to pay all the
different classes of artificers, and other stipendiaries their
salaries: whereas the artificers receive simply their salary,
that is to say, their part of the productions of the earth, in
exchange for their labour, and which does not produce any
increase. The proprietor enjoys nothing but by the labour of the
cultivator. He receives from him his subsistence, and wherewith
to pay for the labour of the other stipendiaries. He has need of
the cultivator by the necessity arising from the physical order
of things, by which necessity the earth is not fruitful without
labour; but the cultivator has no need of the proprietor but by
virtue of human conventions, and of those civil laws which have
guaranteed to the first cultivators and their heirs, the property
in the lands they had occupied, even after they ceased to
cultivate them. But these laws can only secure to the idle man,
that part of the production of his land which it produces beyond
the retribution due to the cultivators. The cultivator, confined
as he is to a stipend for his labour, still preserves that
natural and physical priority which renders him the first mover
of the whole machine of society, and which causes both the
subsistence and wealth of the proprietor, and the salaries paid
for every other species of labour, to depend on his industry. The
artificer, on the contrary, receives his wages either of the
proprietor or of the cultivator, and only gives them in exchange
for his stipend, an equivalent in labour, and nothing more.
Thus, although neither the cultivator and artificer gain more
than a recompence for their toil; yet the labour of the
cultivator produces besides that recompense, a revenue to the
proprietor, while the artificer does not produce any revenue
either for himself or others.
