THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

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tent. Though its cultivation requires much more labour, yetthe surplus which remains after replacing the seed and main-taining all that labour, is likewise much greater. If a poundof butcher’s meat therefore was never supposed to be worthmore than a pound a bread, this greater surplus would every-where be of greater value, and constitute a greater fund bothfor the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord. Itseems to have done so universally in the rude beginnings ofagriculture.

But the relative values of those two dilferent species offood, bread and butcher’s meat, are very dilferent in the dif-ferent periods of agriculture. In its rude beginnings, theunimproved wilds, which then occupy the far greater part ofthe country, are all abandoned to cattle. There is morebutcher's meat than bread, and bread, therefore, is the foodfor which there is the greatest competition, and which con-sequently brings the greatest price. At Buenos Ayres, weare told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty pence halfpennysterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price of anox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred. He saysnothing of the price of bread, probably because he found no-thing remarkable about it. An ox, there, he says, costs lit-tle more than the labour of catching him. But corn can no-where be raised without a great deal of labour, and in acountry which lies upon the river Plate, at that time thedirect road from Europe to the silver mines of Potosi, themoney price of labour could not be very cheap. It is other-wise when cultivation is extended over the greater part ofthe country. There is then more bread than butcher’s meat.The competition changes its direction, and the price ofbutcher’s meat becomes greater than the price of bread.

By the extension besides of cultivation, the unimprovedwilds become insufficient to supply the demand for butcher’smeat. A great part of the cultivated lands must be employedin rearing and fattening cattle, of which the price, therefore,must be sufficient to pay, not only the labour necessary fortending them, but the rent which the landlord and the profitwhich the farmer could have drawn from such land employedin tillage. The cattle bred upon the most uncultivated moors,when brought to the same market, are, in proportion to theirweight or goodness, sold at the same price as those which arereared upon the most improved land. The proprietors of thosemoors profit by it, and raise the rent of their land in proportion