Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/21

 "That which gives rise to society is our inability to satisfy our own desires, and the need we have for a large number of things. Thus necessity having compelled men to combine with one another, society is established for the sake of mutual assistance.… One gives to another what he has in return for what he has not, only because he believes it will be to his advantage." And then he goes on to show the beneficial results of the division of labor.

A much less important figure, Xenophon, has also some interesting observations on the subject. His "Oikonomikos," or "The Economist," though primarily dealing with the domestic economy of the Greeks and the practice of agriculture, is interspersed with passages concerned with social economy in its wider sense. He quaintly speaks of wealth as whatever is useful to a man. "A man's wealth is only what benefits him. Suppose a man used his money to buy a mistress by whose influence his body, his soul, and his household would be all made worse, how could we then say that his money was of any advantage to him?… We may then exclude money also from being counted as wealth, if it is in the hands of one who does not know how to use it." But he believes that money differs essentially from other kinds of wealth.

"There is this difference," he writes, "between silver-getting and other professions, that whereas other men—braziers and blacksmiths, for instance—when their trades are overstocked, are injured because the price of their commodities is necessarily lowered by the multitude of sellers, similarly a good harvest and a plentiful vintage does harm to the farmers, and forces them to leave their