Page:William Petty - Economic Writings (1899) vol 1.djvu/79

Rh nation be ascertained. In the first chapter, accordingly, Petty estimates separately the value of the lands, the houses, the shipping, the cattle, the money and the miscellaneous goods of the country, unblushingly confirming one guess by showing its satisfying conformity to another. Now-a-days more abundant and more accurate figures are available upon which to base guesses, but the methods of modern calculations of national wealth are, so far, not essentially different from his. The second chapter, however, adds to the calculation of the first an element of national wealth which seldom figures in modern tables headed £ s. d. This element is "the value of the people," which it was his consistent practice to include in all his estimates. Fewness of people he thought was real poverty. Hands were the father as lands were the mother of wealth, and neither of the pair might be omitted from a stock-taking of the public household. The suggestion that people are wealth was probably much older than Petty, and his originality would consist rather in the application to it of his political arithmetic than in the invention of the notion. Now in order to add hands to lands he must reduce them to a common denominator. The necessity and the difficulty of thus making "a par and equation between lands and labour" must have been brought home to him by his experience as surveyor and commissioner of allotments, charged with rewarding soldiers on the one hand and loaners of money on the other by proper assignment of the forfeited lands in Ireland, and it is not merely for theoretical purposes that he regards this task as "the most important consideration in political oeconomies ." The common denominator chosen being money, it is necessary to determine the money value of the people. But the people in question are neither bought nor sold, and so he resorts to a calculation. Assuming the expenditure of the people of England to be forty million pounds per annum, he finds that their income from property is sufficient to meet only fifteen millions of it. The source of the remaining twenty-five millions of income is worth as much as the fee of land that would rent for that sum, "for although the individiums of mankind be