For whatever bread is
more worth than acorns, wine than water, and cloth or silk than
leaves, skins or moss, that is wholly owing to labour and industry.
The one of these being the food and raiment which unassisted Nature
furnishes us with; the other provisions which our industry and pains
prepare for us, which how much they exceed the other in value, when
any one hath computed, he will then see how much labour makes the
far greatest part of the value of things we enjoy in this world; and
the ground which produces the materials is scarce to be reckoned in as
any, or at most, but a very small part of it; so little, that even
amongst us, land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no
improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed
it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little
more than nothing.
43. An acre of land that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and
another in America, which, with the same husbandry, would do the like,
are, without doubt, of the same natural, intrinsic value. But yet
the benefit mankind receives from one in a year is worth five
pounds, and the other possibly not worth a penny; if all the profit an
Indian received from it were to be valued and sold here, at least I
may truly say, not one thousandth.
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