ABSTRACT
In our last conversation, we confined ourselves to the reasons which have induced you to include trade in the class which you call sterile. But this class to which you give the name sterile, in contrast to that which you call productive, confining as you do the idea of production to the wealth which is generated from the land, must therefore include all the other kinds of work, all the other services which are not directly employed in the regeneration of this wealth and in the marketing of it in sales at first hand. I admit that it would be difficult, in accordance with your division, to include them all under a single general designation other than that which you have chosen; for trade, the sciences, the arts, the magistrature, the military profession, servants, idle rentiers, beggars even, present so many different kinds of object, service, work, and employment, relative to production understood in its most rigorous physical sense, that I cannot visualize any general designation which would be strictly common to them all. It is for this very reason that I find difficulty in accepting your division and the names which you have applied to it in order to convey its meaning; it seems to me to be all the less exact in that you have differentiated the proprietors of the land from the classes which you call productive and sterile.
