56. Personal property has an exchangeable value, even for land itself.

The slaves were another kind of personal property, which at first were procured by violence, and afterwards by way of commerce and exchange. Those that had many, employed them not only in the culture of land, but in various other channels of labour. The facility of accumulating, almost without measure, those two sources of riches, and of making use of them abstractedly from the land, caused the land itself to be estimated, and the value compared to moveable riches.

A man that would have been possessed of a quantity of lands without cattle or slaves, would undoubtedly have made an advantageous bargain, in yielding a part of his land, to a person that would have offered him in exchange, cattle and slaves to cultivate the rest. It is chiefly by this principle that property in land entered likewise into commerce, and had a comparative value with that of all the other goods. If four bushels of corn, the net produce of an acre of land, was worth six sheep, the acre itself that feeds them could have been given for a certain value, greater indeed, but always easy to settle by the same way, as the price of other wares. Namely, at first by debates among the two contractors, next, by the current price established by the agreement of those who exchange land for cattle, or the contrary. It is by the scale of this current specie that lands are appraised, when a debtor is prosecuted by his creditor, and is constrained to yield up his property.