Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/223

 complying with the motions of nature than contradicting it with vehement administrations of their own; so in politicks and economics the same must be used.

Passing to the prohibition of imports from abroad, 'why,' he asked, 'should we forbid the use of any foreign commodity, which our own hands and country cannot produce, when we can employ our spare hands and lands upon such exportable commodities as will purchase the same and more.' 'For if we should think it hard to give good necessary cloth for debauching wines, yet if we cannot dispose of our wine to others, 'twere better to give it for wine or worse, than to cease making it; nay better to burn a thousand men's labours for a time, than to let those thousand men by non-employment lose their faculty of labouring.'

He thus indicated that labour is the true foundation of wealth and value, and that to increase the facilities for employment and the yield of labour is the genuine method of increasing wealth, and that gold and silver are only one of many forms of it. 'If a man,' he argued, 'can bring to London an ounce of silver out of the earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other; now if by reason of new and more easy mines a man can get two ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did one, then corn will be as cheap at ten shillings the bushel, as it was before at five shillings cæteris paribus.'

'But a further, though collateral question,' he proceeds, 'may be, how much English money this corn or rent is worth; I answer,' he says, 'so much as the money which another single man can save within the same time, over and above his expence, if he employed himself wholly to produce and make it; viz. Let another man go travel into a country where is silver, there dig it, refine it, bring it to the same place where the other man planted his corn; coin it, etc.—the same