mercantile and manufacturing classes, effects to a considerable extent the division and alienation of those immense landed properties, which, if the fashion of personal services had continued, might have remained to this time nearly in their former state, and have prevented the increase of wealth on the land, as well as elsewhere. Surely then some distinction between the different kinds of labour, with reference to their different effects on national wealth, must be admitted to be not only useful, but necessary; and if so, the question is what this distinction should be, and where the line between the different kinds of labour should be drawn.
The opinion that the term productive labour should be exclusively confined to the labour employed upon the land, has been maintained by a particular class of French Economists, and their followers. Without entering upon the general merits of their system, it will only be necessary to observe here, that whatever advantages their definition may claim in point of precision and consistency, yet for the practical and useful purpose of comparing different countries together, with regard to all these objects, which usually enter into our conception of wealth, it is much too confined. Two countries of the same territory and population might possess the same number of agricultural labourers, and even direct the same quantity of skill and capital to the cultivation of the soil, and yet if a considerable proportion of the remaining population in one of them consisted of manufacturers and merchants, and in the other of menial servants and soldiers, the former might have all the indications of wealth, and the latter all the symptoms of poverty. The number and skill of the agricultural labourers, therefore, cannot alone determine the national wealth. We evidently want some definition of productiveness, which refers to the effects of manufacturing and mercantile capital and skill; and unless we consider the labour which produces these most important results as productive of riches, we shall find it quite impossible to trace the causes of
