
“There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth: the first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors – this is robery; the second by commerce, which is generally cheating; the third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein a man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in hid favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.”