“To build is a great source of wealth, because it supplies revenues to proprietors, who furnish the materials, to workmen, and to divers classes of artisans and artists. Melon cites Sir William Petty, who regards, as a ‹national profit›, the labour employed in rebuilding the streets of London after the great fire which consumed two-thirds of the city, and he estimates it (the profit!) at a million sterling per annum (in money of 1666) during four years, and this without the least injury having been done to other branches of trade. Without regarding this pecuniary estimate ‹of profit› as quite accurate,” adds M. de Saint-Chamans, “it is certain at least that this event had no detrimental effect upon the wealth of England at that period. . . . The result stated by Sir W. Petty is not impossible, seeing that the necessity of rebuilding London must have created a large amount of new revenues.”[46] All Economists, who set out by confounding ‹wealth› with ‹value›, must infallibly arrive at the same conclusions, if they are logical; but they are not logical; for on the road of absurdity men of any common sense always sooner or later stop short. M. de Saint-Chamans seems himself to recede a little before the consequences of his principle, when it lands him in a eulogium on conflagration. We see that he hesitates, and contents himself with a negative panegyric. He should have carried out his principle to [p187] its logical conclusions, and told us roundly what he so clearly indicates. Of all our Economists, M. de Sismondi has succumbed to the difficulty now under consideration in the manner most to be regretted. Like M. de Saint-Chamans, he set out with the idea that value forms an element of wealth; and, like him, he has built upon this datum a Political Economy ‹à rebours›, denouncing everything which tends to diminish value. Sismondi, like Saint-Chamans, exalts obstacles, proscribes machinery, anathematizes exchange, competition, and liberty, extols luxury and taxation, and arrives at length at this conclusion, that the more we possess the poorer we become.[47]