Considering a nation as a whole, it has no net product; for, as products have no value beyond the costs of production, when these costs are cut off, the entire value of the product is cut off. National production, annual production, should always therefore be understood as gross production. The annual revenue is the gross revenue. The term net production is applicable only when considering the interests of one producer in opposition to those of other producers. The manager of an enterprise gets his PROFIT from the value PRODUCED after deducting the value CONSUMED. But what to him is value consumed, such as the purchase of a productive service, is so much income to the performer of the service.--Treatise on Political Economy: Analytical Table. These definitions are irreproachable. Unhappily J. B. Say did not see their full bearing, and could not have foreseen that one day his immediate successor at the College of France would attack them. M. Rossi has pretended to refute the proposition of J. B. Say that TO A NATION NET PRODUCT IS THE SAME THING AS GROSS PRODUCT by this consideration,--that nations, no more than individuals of enterprise, can produce without advances, and that, if J. B. Say's formula were true, it would follow that the axiom, Ex nihilo nihil fit, is not true Now, that is precisely what happens. Humanity, in imitation of God, produces everything from nothing, de nihilo hilum just as it is itself a product of nothing, just as its thought comes out of the void; and M. Rossi would not have made such a mistake, if, like the physiocrats, he had not confounded the products of the INDUSTRIAL KINGDOM with those of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Political economy begins with labor; it is developed by labor; and all that does not come from labor, falling into the domain of pure utility,--that is, into the category of things submitted to man's action, but not yet rendered exchangeable by labor,--remains radically foreign to political economy. Monopoly itself, wholly established as it is by a pure act of collective will, does not change these relations at all, since, according to history, and according to the written law, and according to economic theory, monopoly exists, or is reputed to exist, only after labor's appearance. Say's doctrine, therefore, is unassailable. Relatively to the man of enterprise, whose specialty always supposes other manufacturers cooperating with him, profit is what remains of the value produced after deducting the values consumed, among which must be included the salary of the man of enterprise,--in other words, his wages. Relatively to society, which contains all possible specialties, net product is identical with gross product.