tive labour of the country, and the value of its CHAP. annual produce, as the most direct.

When the capital stock of any country is increased to fuch a degree, that it cannot be all employed in fupplying the consumption, and supporting the productive labour of that particular country, the furplus part of it naturally disgorges itself into the carrying trade, and is employed in performing the fame offices to other countries. The carrying trade is the natural effect and symptom of great national wealth; but it does not seem to be the natural cause of it. Those statesmen who have been difposed to favour it with particular eacouragements, seem to have mistaken the effect and symptom for the cause. Holland, in proportion to the extent of the land and the number of its inhabitants, by far the richest country in Europe, has, accordingly, the greatest share of the carrying trade of Europe. England, perhaps the second richest country of Europe, is likewise supposed to have a confiderable share of it; though what commonly passes for the carrying trade of England, will frequently, perhaps, be found to be no more than a round-about foreign trade of confumption. Such are, in a great measure, the trades which carry the goods of the East and West Indies, and of America, to different European markets. Those goods are generally purchafed either immediately with the produce of British industry, or with fomething else which had been purchased with that produce, and the final returns of those trades are generally ufed or con. fumed

F3

V.

воок fumed in Great Britain. The trade which is H. carried on in British bottoms between the different ports of the Mediterranean, and some trade of the fame kind carried on by British merchants between the different ports of India, make, perhaps, the principal branches of what is properly the carrying trade of Great Britain.

The extent of the home-trade and of the capital which can be employed in it, is necessarily limited by the value of the furplus produce of all those distant places within the country which have occafion to exchange their respective productions with one another. That of the foreign trade of confumption, by the value of the furplus produce of the whole country and of what can be purchased with it. That of the carrying trade, by the value of the furplus produce of all the different countries in the world. Its poffible extent, therefore, is in a manner infinite in comparison of that of the other two, and is capable of absorbing the greatest capitals.

The confideration of his own private profit, is the fole motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufactures, or in fome particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade. The different quantities of productive labour which it may put into motion, and the different values which it may add to the annual produce of the land and labour of the fociety, according as it is employed in one or other of those different ways, never enter into his thoughts. In countries, therefore, where agriculture is the most profitable of

all

:

V.

all employments, and farming and improving the CHAP. most direct roads to a splendid fortune, the capitals of individuals will naturally be employed in the manner most advantageous to the whole fociety. The profits of agriculture, however, seem to have no fuperiority over those of other employments in any part of Europe. Projectors, indeed, in every corner of it, have within thefe few years amused the public with most magnificent accounts of the profits to be made by the cultivation and improvement of land. Without entering into any particular difcuffion of their calculations, a very fimple obfervation may fatisfy us that the refult of them must be falfe. We fee every day the most splendid fortunes that have been acquired in the course of a fingle life by trade and manufactures, frequently from a very small capital, fometimes from no capital. A fingle instance of fuch a fortune acquired by agriculture in the fame time, and from fuch a capital, has not, perhaps, occurred in Europe during the course of the prefent century. In all the great countries of Europe, however, much good land still remains uncultivated, and the greater part of what is cultivated, is far from being improved to the degree of which it is capable. Agriculture, therefore, is almost everywhere capable of abforbing a much greater capital than has ever yet been employed in it. What circumstances in the policy of Europe have given the trades which are carried on in towns fo great an advantage over that which is carried on in the country,

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воок country, that private persons frequently find it II. more for their advantage to employ their capitals in the most distant carrying trades of Afia and America, than in the improvement and cultivation of the most fertile fields in their own neighbourhood, I shall endeavour to explain at full length in the two following books.

BOOK III.

OF THE DIFFERENT PROGRESS OF OPULENCE IN

DIFFERENT NATIONS.

T

CHAP. I.

Of the natural Progress of Opulence.

III. CHAP. I.

HE great commerce of every civilized fo- воок ciety, is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. It confifts in the exchange of rude for manufactured produce, either immediately, or by the intervention of money, or of fome fort of paper which represents money. The country supplies the town with the means of fubfiftence, and the materials of manufacture. The town repays this fupply by fending 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 faid to gain its whole wealth and fubfiftence from the country. We must not, however, upon this account, imagine that the gain of the town is the lofs of the country. The gains of both are mutual and reciprocal, and the division of labour is in this, as in all other cafes, advantageous to all the different persons employed in the various occupations into which it is