Читать книгу A Treatise on Political Economy - Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy - Страница 27

Of the change of form, or of manufacturing Industry, comprising Agriculture.

In every species of industry there are three things: theory, application and execution.

Hence three kinds of labourers; the man of science, the entrepreneur, and the workman.

All are obliged to expend more or less before they can receive, and especially the entrepreneur.

These advances are furnished by anterior economies, and are called capitals.

The man of science and the workman are regularly compensated by the entrepreneur; but he has no benefit but in proportion to the success of his manufacturing.

It is indispensable that the labors most necessary should be the most moderately recompensed.

This is true most especially of those relative to agricultural industry.

This has moreover the inconvenience that the agricultural entrepreneur cannot make up for the mediocrity of his profits by the great extension of his business.

Accordingly this profession has no attractions for the rich.

The proprietors of land who do not cultivate it are strangers to agricultural industry. They are merely lenders of funds.

They dispose of them according to the convenience of those whom they can engage to labor them.

There are four sorts of entrepreneurs; two with greater or smaller means, the lessees of great and small farms; and two almost without means, those who farm as sharecroppers and labourers.

Hence four species of cultivation essentially different.

The division into great and small culture is insufficient and subject to ambiguity.

Agriculture then is the first of arts in relation to necessity, but not in regard to riches.

It is because our means of subsistence and our means of existence are two very different things, and we are wrong to confound them.