and the profits of stock ; and a still smaller number, in which it consists
altogether in the wages of labour. In the price of sea-fish, for example,
one part pays the labour of the fisherman, and the other the profits of the
capital employed in the fishery. Rent very seldom makes any part of it,
though it does sometimes, as I shall shew hereafter. It is otherwise, at
least through the greater part of Europe, in river fisheries. A salmon
fishery pays a rent ; and rent, though it cannot well be called the rent of
land, makes a part of the price of a salmon, as well as wares and profit. In
some parts of Scotland, a few poor people make a trade of gathering, along
the sea-shore, those little variegated stones commonly known by the name of
Scotch pebbles. The price which is paid to them by the stone-cutter, is
altogether the wages of their labour ; neither rent nor profit makes an part
of it.

But the whole price of any commodity must still finally resolve itself into some one or other
or all of those three parts; as whatever part of it remains after paying the rent of the land, and
the price of the whole labour employed in raising, manufacturing, and bringing it to market,
must necessarily be profit to somebody.

As the price or exchangeable value of every particular commodity, taken
separately, resolves itself into some one or other, or all of those three
parts ; so that of all the commodities which compose the whole annual
produce of the labour of every country, taken complexly, must resolve itself
into the same three parts, and be parcelled out among different inhabitants
of the country, either as the wages of their labour, the profits of their
stock, or the rent of their land. The whole of what is annually either
collected or produced by the labour of every society, or, what comes to the
same thing, the whole price of it, is in this manner originally distributed
among some of its different members. Wages, profit, and rent, are the three
original sources of all revenue, as well as of all exchangeable value. All