It is labour, then, which puts
the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would
scarcely be worth anything; it is to that we owe the greatest part
of all its useful products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of
that acre of wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as
good land which lies waste is all the effect of labour. For it is
not barely the ploughman's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil,
and the baker's sweat, is to be counted into the bread we eat; the
labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron
and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the
plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number,
requisite to this corn, from its sowing to its being made bread,
must all be charged on the account of labour, and received as an
effect of that; Nature and the earth furnished only the almost
worthless materials as in themselves. It would be a strange
catalogue of things that industry provided and made use of about every
loaf of bread before it came to our use if we could trace them;
iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime,
cloth, dyeing-drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials
made use of in the ship that brought any of the commodities made use
of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work, all which it
would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.
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