systems of policy was to the last degree unimportant when compared with that endeavored to be produced by the system above described. In their cases it was commerce with distant men, alone, that was to be impeded; but here it was the greatest of all commerce-commerce at home-the power of association, and all development of individuality, that were to be annihilated. the accomplishment of that object no effort was omitted. Commodities in a crude state, subject to heavy charges for transportation, as in the case of paddy (or rough rice) and sugar, were admitted at low duties; whereas clean rice and refined sugar were charged with duties so heavy as to offer a large bounty in favor of their export from India or the West Indies in the crudest shape — and even then they could be sent to the world only through an English port, or an English ship.

Prohibitions of manufactures, on one hand, and bounties on the import of raw materials, on the other, were thus resorted to, with a view to prevent the colonists from making those changes in the forms of matter that were required for fitting the products of the earth for consumption among themselves. The one great object of the system was that of maintaining in its most bulky form the commodity requiring to be transported, while diminishing to the smallest size the machinery by which the work of transportation and conversion was to be effected thereby enriching the trader and transporter at the cost of both consumer and producer. The more perfectly it could be carried out, the smaller would be the quantity of cloth obtainable by the man who produced sugar; the smaller would be the quantity of sugar obtainable by him to whose labor the cloth was due; the greater would be the tendency to have the appearance of population pressing on the limits of subsistence; and the greater would be the tendency to find in erroneous arrangements of the Creator an apology for a state of affairs whose existence was due solely to the contrivances of man.

§ 3. Society, association, and commerce are, as has been shown, but different forms of expression for the same idea—and that idea the first of all the needs of man. Without association there can be no society, and without society there can be no commerce. All of these words describe the motion among men resulting from exchange of services or ideas, the products of mus

cular or intellectual effort. The more perfect the forma of society, the greater will always be the differences among its parts, the more continuous and regular will be their motion among each other, and the greater will be the force exerted. So is it with all the machinery contrived by man for the purpose of subduing to his service the wonderful forces of nature. The marvels accomplished by the steam-engine are great so great, that they would be deemed wholly incredible by a man who had passed from the world half a century since; and yet, it is scarcely possible to fix a price that might not now be paid for the secret of a perfectly acting rotary engine, because by its help the rapidity of motion could be still so much increased. It is the continuous motion of society that is sought for by men when they prefer to arrange business face to face, by means of conversation, in preference to the constantly intermitting motion of correspondence. It is that motion which is sought by every inventor of a machine - every mill-owner-every man, in fact, that desires to increase his power over the natural forces furnished for the use of man. It is that motion which is described by Adam Smith in the following passages, given thus at length, because their illustrious author is so frequently quoted as authority for the system that looks to the building up of trade at the cost of commerce :

"An inland country, naturally fertile and easily cultivated, produces a great surplus of provisions beyond what is necessary for maintaining the cultivators; and on account of the expense of land carriage, and inconveniency of river navigation, it may frequently be difficult to send this surplus abroad. Abundance, therefore, renders provisions cheap, and encourages a great number of workmen to settle in the neighborhood, who find that their industry can there procure them more of the necessaries and conveniences of life than in other places. They work up the materials of manufacture which the land produces, and exchange their finished work, or, what is the same thing, the price of it, for more materials and provisions. They give a new value to the surplus part of the rude produce, by saving the expense of carrying it to the water-side or to some distant market; and they furnish the cultivators with something in exchange for it, that is either useful or agreeable to them, upon easier terms than they could have obtained it before. The cultivators get a better price for their sur

plus produce, and can purchase cheaper other conveniences which they have occasion for. They are thus both encouraged and enabled to increase this surplus produce by a further improvement and better cultivation of the land; and as the fertility of the land has given birth to the manufacture, so the progress of the manufacture reacts upon the land, and increases still further its fertility. The manufacturers first supply the neighborhood, and afterwards, as their work improves and refines, more distant markets. For, though neither the rude produce, nor even the coarse manufacture, could, without the greatest difficulty, support the expense of a considerable land carriage, the refined and improved manufacture easily may. In a small bulk it frequently contains the price of a great quantity of the raw produce. A piece of fine cloth, for example, which weighs only eighty pounds, contains in it the price, not only of eighty pounds of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the maintenance of the different working people, and of their immediate employers. The corn which could with difficulty have been carried abroad in its own shape, is in this manner virtually exported in that of the complete manufacture, and may easily be sent to the remotest corners of the world. In this manner have grown up naturally, and, as it were, of their own accord, the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton. Such manufactures are the offspring of agriculture."*

"The great commerce of every civilized society is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. It consists in the exchange of rude for manufactured produce, either immediately, or by the intervention of money, or of some sort of paper which represents money. The country supplies the town with the means of subsistence and the materials of manufacture. The town repays this supply, by sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which there neither is, nor can be, any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country. We must not, however, upon this account, imagine that the gain of the town is the loss of the country. The gains of both are mutual and reciprocal, and the division of labor is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous to

*Wealth of Nations, book 3, chap. iii.

all the different persons employed in the various occupations into which it is subdivided. The inhabitants of the country purchase of the town a greater quantity of manufactured goods with the produce of a much smaller quantity of their own labor, than they must have employed had they attempted to prepare them themselves. The town affords a market for the surplus produce of the country, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators; and it is there that the inhabitants of the country exchange it for something else which is in demand among them. The greater the number and revenue of the inhabitants of the town, the more extensive is the market which it affords to those of the country; and the more extensive that market, it is always the more advantageous to a great number. The corn which grows within a mile of the town sells there for the same price with that which comes from twenty miles distance. But the price of the latter must, generally, not only pay the expense of raising it and bringing it to market, but afford, too, the ordinary profits of agriculture to the farmer. The proprietors and cultivators of the country, therefore, which lies in the neighborhood of the town, over and above the ordinary profits of agriculture, gain, in the price of what they sell, the whole value of the carriage of the like produce that is brought from more distant parts; and they save, besides, the whole value of this carriage in the price of what they buy. Compare the cultivation of the lands in the neighborhood of any considerable town, with that of those which lie at some distance from it, and you will easily satisfy yourself how much the country is benefited by the commerce of the town."*

The motion here described is properly characterized as commerce. The plain good sense of Adam Smith enabled him clearly to comprehend the error of the system which found in exports and imports the only index to prosperity; and also, fully to understand the enormous waste of labor resulting from imposing upon communities a necessity for exporting wool, corn, cotton, and other products of the earth, in their rudest shape, to be returned again in the form of cloth. He was no believer in centralization of any kind. Least of all did he believe in that which looked to compelling all the farmers and planters to go to a single market, and to augmenting the necessity for de

* Ibid.

pendence on wagons and ships-while increasing the profits of trade, and the proportion of every population required to be employed in the work of effecting changes of place. On the contrary, he had full and entire faith in the system of local centres by help of which, as he so clearly saw, commerce had been everywhere so much developed — and that was the system to whose advantage he desired to call the attention of his countrymen. From that hour to the present, however, the system he denounced has been pursued—all the efforts of his countrymen having been directed towards producing the effect of continuing at its highest point the tax of transportation; and here it is, perhaps, that we may find the cause of the idea of over-population.

§ 4. From the date of the conquest of the several WEST INDIA COLONIES, manufactures of every kind were strictly prohibited the interdiction being carried so far that their inhabitants were not permitted even to refine their own sugar. There was, of course, no employment, even for women and children, but in the labors of the field. All were required to remain producers of raw commodities maintaining no commerce among themselves, except through the intervention of a people thousands of miles distant, who used their power to such effect as not only to prohibit manufactures, but also to prevent diversification of employment in agriculture itself. In Jamaica, indigo had been tried, but of the price for which it sold in England so large a portion proved to be absorbed by ship-owners, commission-merchants, and the government, that its culture had been abandoned. Coffee was extensively introduced, and as it grows on higher and more salubrious lands, its cultivation would have been of great advantage to the community; but here, as in the case of indigo, so small a portion of its price was received by the producer, that its production was almost abandoned, and was saved only by an agreement to reduce the claims of government to a shilling a pound. The estimated produce being about seven hundred and fifty pounds of merchantable coffee, this amounted to about $180 per acre.* The ultimate effect of the system was that of terminating all commerce among the people-even that which previously had existed between those who raised coffee, on the one hand, and those * Dallas's History of the Maroons, vol. i. page c