ChapterTwoBookOne79

In a state, excluding those who govern, (309) there are three professions that principally contribute to public opulence by producing and procuring necessary, convenient, and superfluous things: that of farmers, artisans, and merchants. They support all the others, which gives them and preserves, so to speak, their life. The number of contributors to the state’s wealth that these three professions encompass is so large that the rest seem almost nothing next to them; that is why they are the main object of the attentions of the prince who wants to get rich. Because they multiply considerably more than the others, their wealth makes the wealth of others and infinitely helps them (310) to multiply, as I will show more fully below. It is therefore advantageous for the wealth[^1] of the state that all the sciences that contribute to perfecting these three professions are favored by the prince above all the others, and that young people’s minds are nourished[^2] with the necessary knowledge for perfecting these professions, and that this education[^3] becomes commonplace, and that everyone has their share, that is to say, that the poor and the rich find it easily, and that fathers are even obliged and forced to send their children to the public schools that the prince will establish to facilitate the necessary instruction in all that concerns the theory (311) and the practice of these professions.

Although noblemen do not destine their children for any of these professions, as some commoners do, it will nevertheless be advantageous to the state and to their individual interests if they at least have a theory of them that will give them sound ideas in public obligations and their domestic affairs. It does not even seem to demean a nobleman to know and in any way exercise one of these professions. Agriculture, for example, has always been the usual occupation of nobles when they did not go to war. Although they did it through their servants, nevertheless they were the ones who distributed the duties and ordered them (312) to do everything that was necessary to make the land more fertile. And since still today most of the nobility live only off the revenues of their estates, it is as important for their individual interests as for those of the state that they are well-educated in all the knowledge that contributes to making agriculture perfect.