Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/22

 occupations, and to turn merchants or bankers; with silver it is otherwise; the more ore is found, and the more mines are worked, the more people seek to possess it, and the more men are employed.… If there are any who have more than they require, they hoard it up with as much pleasure as if they actually made use of it.… And in war what resource have we left but silver to purchase necessaries for our support, and to hire allies for our defence?" We find here the germs of the mercantile theory, although Xenophon, in common with most of his contemporaries, regarded agriculture as the only industrial occupation not altogether contemptible for the free man. His view of the relative advantages to the human constitution of the agricultural and the handicraft life displays a considerable amount of enlightenment, on one side of the question at least. "Not only are the mechanical arts despised, but States also have a bad opinion of them—and justly. For they injure the health of the workmen and overseers, by compelling them to sit indoors, and often all day before a fire, and when the body is weakened the mind also is made weaker and weaker." But in this depreciation of the artisan's craft we see the beginning of the physiocratic fallacy that agriculture is the only original source of wealth. The following extract from the "Oikonomikos" will illustrate the view of slavery common to the ancients, and which appears, as will be seen, no less in Aristotle and later writers. He takes it for granted that the citizen will have slaves to work for him. "Men do not live as animals do, under the open vault of heaven, but evidently require shelter. To have anything to bring