An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of NationsSmith, Adam
General
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Smith, Adam
Economics
In a hop garden, a fruit garden, a kitchen garden, both the rent of the
landlord, and the profit of the farmer, are generally greater than in a
corn or grass field. But to bring the ground into this condition
requires more expense. Hence a greater rent becomes due to the landlord.
It requires, too, a more attentive and skilful management. Hence a
greater profit becomes due to the farmer. The crop, too, at least in the
hop and fruit garden, is more precarious. Its price, therefore, besides
compensating all occasional losses, must afford something like the
profit of insurance. The circumstances of gardeners, generally mean, and
always moderate, may satisfy us that their great ingenuity is not
commonly over-recompensed. Their delightful art is practised by so many
rich people for amusement, that little advantage is to be made by these
who practise it for profit; because the persons who should naturally be
their best customers, supply themselves with all their most precious
productions.
The advantage which the landlord derives from such improvements, seems
at no time to have been greater than what was sufficient to compensate
the original expense of making them. In the ancient husbandry, after the
vineyard, a well-watered kitchen garden seems to have been the part of
the farm which was supposed to yield the most valuable produce. But
Democritus, who wrote upon husbandry about two thousand years ago, and
who was regarded by the ancients as one of the fathers the of the art,
thought they did not act wisely who inclosed a kitchen garden. The
profit, he said, would not compensate the expense of a stone-wall: and
bricks (he meant, I suppose, bricks baked in the sun) mouldered with the
rain and the winter-storm, and required continual repairs. Columella,
who reports this judgment of Democritus, does not controvert it, but
proposes a very frugal method of inclosing with a hedge of brambles and
briars, which he says he had found by experience to be both a lasting
and an impenetrable fence; but which, it seems, was not commonly known
in the time of Democritus. Palladius adopts the opinion of Columella,
which had before been recommended by Varro. In the judgment of these
ancient improvers, the produce of a kitchen garden had, it seems, been
little more than sufficient to pay the extraordinary culture and the
expense of watering; for in countries so near the sun, it was thought
proper, in those times as in the present, to have the command of a
stream of water, which could be conducted to every bed in the garden.
Through the greater part of Europe, a kitchen garden is not at present
supposed to deserve a better inclosure than that recommended by
Columella. In Great Britain, and some other northern countries, the
finer fruits cannot be brought to perfection but by the assistance of a
wall. Their price, therefore, in such countries, must be sufficient to
pay the expense of building and maintaining what they cannot be had
without.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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