If the fortune of nations, and their tendency to aggrandizement, or to
ruin, were to be estimated by merely balancing, on the principles of the
last section, articles of profit and loss, every argument in politics would
rest on a comparison of national expense with national gain; on a
comparison of the numbers who consume, with those who produce or amass the
necessaries of life. The columns of the industrious, and the idle, would
include all orders of men; and the state itself, being allowed as many
magistrates, politicians, and warriors, as were barely sufficient for its
defence and its government, should place, on the side of its loss, every
name that is supernumerary on the civil or the military list; all those
orders of men, who, by the possession of fortune, subsist on the gains of
others, and by the nicety of their choice, require a great expense of time
and of labour, to supply their consumption; all those who are idly employed
in the train of persons of rank; all those who are engaged in the
professions of law, physic, or divinity, together with all the learned who
do not, by their studies, promote or improve the practice of some lucrative
trade. The value of every person, in short, should be computed from his
labour; and that of labour itself, from its tendency to procure and amass
the means of subsistence. The arts employed on mere superfluities should be
prohibited, except when their produce could be exchanged with foreign
nations, for commodities that might be employed to maintain useful men for
the public.

These appear to be the rules by which a miser would examine the state of
his own affairs, or those of his country; but schemes of perfect corruption
are at least as impracticable as schemes of perfect virtue. Men are not
universally misers; they will not be satisfied with the pleasure of
hoarding; they must be suffered to enjoy their wealth, in order that they