What is true of industrial employees is no less true of the toilers of the field. In this connection Sismondi introduces the celebrated distinction between net and gross production which has occupied the attention of many economists since then. If the peasants collectively owned all the land they would at least of a certainty find both the security and the support of their life in the soil. They would never let the gross produce fall below what was sufficient to support them.[412] But with great landed proprietors, and with the peasant transformed into the agricultural labourer, things have changed. The large proprietors have the net product only in view—that is, the difference between the cost of production and the sale price. It matters little to them if the gross produce is sacrificed for the sake of increasing the net produce. Here you have land which, when well cultivated, brings gross produce of the value of 1000 shillings to the farmer and yields 100 shillings in rent to the proprietor. But the proprietor thinks that he would gain 110 shillings if he left it fallow or let it as unprofitable pasture. “His gardener or vinedresser is dismissed, but he gains 10 shillings and the nation loses 890. By and by the capital employed in producing this plentiful supply will no longer be so employed, and there will be no profit. The workers whose former toil produced these products will no longer be employed and no wages will be paid.”[413] Examples are plentiful enough. A number of the great Scotch proprietors, in order to replace the ancient system of cultivation by the open pasture system, sent the tenants from their dwellings and drove them into the towns or huddled them on board ships for America. In Italy a handful of speculators called the _Mercanti di tenute_, animated by similar motives, have hindered the repopulation and cultivation of the Roman Campagna, “that territory formerly so very fertile that five acres were sufficient to provide sustenance for a whole family as well as sending a recruit to the army. To-day its scattered homesteads, its villages, the whole population, together with the farm enclosures, the vineyards, and the olive plantations—products that require the continual loving attention of mankind—have all disappeared, giving place to a few flocks of sheep tended by a few miserable shepherds.”[414] The criticism is just, but is directed rather against the abuse of private property than against the principle of the net product, for this principle is incident to peasant proprietorship as well. It is inevitable wherever production for a market takes place.[415] It is just this opposition between proprietorship and labour that supplies an explanation of economic crises.