Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations > Status Update

"But of all the productions of land, milk is perhaps the most perishable. In the warm season, when it is most abundant, it will scarce keep four-and-twenty hours. The farmer, by making it into fresh butter, stores a small part of it for a week; by making it into salt butter, for a year; and by making it into cheese, he stores a much greater part of it for several years" (99).

"The price of all metals, though liable to slow and gradual variations, varies less from year to year than that of almost any other part of the rude produce of land; and the price of the precious metals is even less liable to sudden variations than that of the coarse ones. The durableness of metals is the foundation of this extraordinary steadiness of price" (91).

"[Silver's] price would sink gradually lower and lower till it fell to its natural price or to what was just sufficient to pay, according to their natural rates, the wages of the labour, the profits of the stock, and the rent of the land, which must e paid in order to bring it from the mine to the market" (87).

"Labour, it must always be remembered, and not any particular commodity or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities" (81).

"Among savage and barbarous nations, a hundredth or little more than a hundredth part of the labour of the whole year will be sufficient to provide them with such clothing and lodging as satisfy the greater part of the people. All the other ninety-nine parts are frequently no more than enough to provide them with food" (71).

"A good rice field is a bog at all seasons, and at one season a bog covered with water. It is unfit either for corn, or pasture, or vineyard, or, indeed, for any other vegetable produce that is very useful to men; and the lands which are fit for those purposes are not fit for rice" (69).

"The pretence of this order was the scarcity of corn and pasture, and the superabundance of wine. But had this superabundance been real, it would without any order of council, have effectually prevented the plantation of new vineyards by reducing the profits of this species of cultivation below their natural proportion to those of corn and pasture" (67).

"Whenever the law has attempted to regulate the wages of workmen, it has always been rather to lower them than to raise them" (56).

"The property which every man has in his own labour...is the most sacred & inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength & dexterity of his hands...to hinder him from employing this...in what manner he thinks proper...is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is [an]...encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman & of those who might be disposed to employ him" (52).

"The most hazardous of all trades, that of a smuggler, though when the adventure succeeds it is likewise the most profitable, is the infallible road to bankruptcy. The presumptuous hope of success seems to act here as upon all other occasions, and to entice so many adventurers into those hazardous trades, that their competition reduces their profit far below what is sufficient to compensate the risk" (47).