Daily Inspiration Quote by William Petty

Petty’s sentence reads like a cool ledger entry, but it’s a quiet revolution in how to think about domestic life: the house stops being a moral symbol and becomes a financial device. “Double nature” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s not marveling at architecture or family; he’s splitting the home into two columns, debit and credit, and insisting both are real at once. In one mode, a house is “expence” - maintenance, servants, repairs, rent, taxes, status consumption. In the other, it’s “instrument and tool of gain” - a productive asset that can generate income directly (rent, lodging, storage, a workshop) or indirectly by enabling work, trade, and social networks.

The intent is diagnostic, almost clinical: strip sentiment from property and you can measure it, compare it, govern it. That fits Petty’s wider project in Political Arithmetick, where the nation becomes something you can count and optimize. The subtext is bluntly modern: households are not just private sanctuaries; they’re economic units, and housing policy is fiscal policy. Even the phrasing “instrument and tool” borrows from the world of labor, suggesting a house can function like capital equipment - a move that anticipates later ideas about capital, investment, and return.

Context matters. In 17th-century England, amid urban growth, colonial expansion, and early financial innovation, property was a central engine of wealth and power. Petty’s “double nature” also carries an implicit warning: a house can drain you as easily as it can enrich you. The line punctures gentility with arithmetic, and it still lands because we’re living inside the same split every time we call housing both “home” and “asset class.”