Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson is doing something sly here: he takes a word everybody wants to own - "riches" - and quietly narrows its meaning until it points back to dirt, labor, and national self-sufficiency. In an age when Britain was swelling on imperial trade, finance, and the early stirrings of industrial capitalism, this reads like a corrective from a moralist watching the country confuse paper prosperity with something sturdier. Agriculture, for Johnson, is not just one sector among many; it is the one form of wealth that cannot be outsourced, pirated, or inflated. The phrase "call her own" is the dagger: it implies that other riches are contingent, borrowed, or extractive, dependent on markets, colonies, or war.

The gendered "nation... she" softens the sentence while also making the argument feel domestic and bodily: the country as a household that must be fed. That framing matters because Johnson is less interested in GDP than in character. Farming becomes a civic virtue, a discipline that ties people to seasons and limits, the opposite of speculative frenzy. There's a hint of Augustan suspicion toward luxury here: commerce may make you wealthy, but it also makes you restless, corruptible, and vulnerable to shocks you can't control.

The intent isn't pastoral nostalgia; it's political realism dressed as ethics. Johnson is staking out an idea of national security before that phrase existed: the wealth that counts is the wealth that keeps you alive when the ships don't come in.