Everything that I have just shown about the fixing of the price of life’s necessary things boils down to the general rule that is established and manifested by the natural order: it is impossible to establish true and solid wealth without a proportional exchange of goods in which all contributors[^1] must (263) participate; their power and will to contribute proportionally to its preservation must also be maintained. And since men’s blindness makes them stray everyday from this true path that nature shows them and because they follow a path that is entirely contrary to their true interests by wanting an infinite number of others to contribute to their needs without wanting to do the same for them in a fair proportion, it is good for the prince to make it impossible for them to do otherwise, despite their inclination to ruin others in order to enrich themselves.
We must be persuaded that the basis for this noble undertaking is in the fixing of the price of life’s necessary things by (264) the means noted, because, once again, it is indisputable that the rest will follow by itself, or at least will not be difficult to put on the same footing. In the establishment of my proposal to fix the value of life’s necessary things, it is only necessary that we accurately consider the situation of the state in which we want to implement it: its neighbors, the number of people, the quantity of foodstuffs they need approximately every year, and the quantity that needs to be withdrawn and stored in public warehouses or sent abroad in order to sustain the balance in the price and to solidify the establishment, which can be shown more particularly in time and place by separate reports.
However, I must (265) hereby warn the princes who will find, as I hope, my project advantageous and reasonable to beware of two things. First, I do not want to make them grain merchants nor teach them a new way of getting rich by raising and lowering the price of grain on a whim in order to draw into their coffers all the wealth of the people, as it is practiced elsewhere to the great harm of the people and the true interests of the prince. This maxim, which I strongly rebuke in an individual, would be infinitely more reprehensible in a prince. Apart from making the people regard him as a tyrant and exposing him to dangerous revolutions, it would also be the (266) true path, under a false appearance of wealth, to destroying the state. That is why I must say, secondly, that a sovereign prince (because republics have nothing to fear in this regard) who wants to implement my project should take every imaginable precaution for fear that his successors and their ministers, from a black greed to make money, would create a problem that would be the abomination of the human race. The best way to prevent this would be not to get personally involved in the establishment and the management of the public warehouses that would maintain this necessary balance in the value of grains, but to have them established by the ruling bodies[^2] of the principal cities of each province, (267) which, when they have had a taste of their usefulness, will have too much of an interest in them not to preserve them forever.
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