V.

all employments, and farming and improving the CHA P. moft direct roads to a fplendid fortune, the capitals of individuals' will naturally be employed in the manner moft advantageous to the whole fociety. The profits of agriculture, however, feem to have no fuperiority over those of other employments in any part of Europe. Projectors, indeed, in every corner of it, have within these few years amufed the public with moft 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 moft fplendid 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 inftance 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 ftill 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 circumftances 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,

F 4

II.

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

BOOK III.

OF THE DIFFERENT PROGRESS OF OPULENCE IN

DIFFERENT NATIONS.

CHAP. I.

Of the natural Progress of Opulence. THE great commerce of every civilized fo

ciety, is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and thofe 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 reprefents money. The country fupplies 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 fubftances, 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 divifion of labour is in this, as in all other cafes, advanta geous to all the different perfons employed in the various occupations into which it is.

BOOK

III.

CHAP.

I.

BOOK fubdivided. The inhabitants of the country pur III. chafe of the town a greater quantity of manufactured goods, with the produce of a much smaller quantity of their own labour, than they must have employed had they attempted to prepare them themselves. The town affords a market for the furplus 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 fomething else which is in demand among them. The greater the number and revenue of the inhabitants of the town, the more extenfive is the market which it affords to thofe 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, fells there for the fame price with that which comes from twenty miles diftance. But the price of the latter muft generally, not only pay the expence of raising 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 neighbourhood of the town, over and above the ordinary profits of agriculture, gain, in the price of what they fell, the whole value of the carriage of the like produce that is brought from more diftant parts, and they fave, befides, the whole value of this carriage in the price of what they buy. Compare the cultivation of the lands in the neighbourhood of any confiderable town, with that of thofe which lie at fome distance

from

I.

from it, and you will eafily fatisfy yourself how CHA P. much the country is benefited by the commerce of the town. Among all the abfurd fpeculations that have been propagated concerning the balance of trade, it has never been pretended that either the country lofes by its commerce with the town, or the town by that with the country which maintains it.

As fubfiftence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, fo the industry which procures the former, muft neceffarily be prior to that which minifters to the latter. The cultivation and improvement of the country, therefore, which affords fubfiftence, muft, neceffarily, be prior to the increase of the town, which furnishes only the means of conveniency and luxury. It is the furplus produce of the country only, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, that conftitutes the fubfiftence of the town, which can therefore increase only with the increase of this furplus produce. The town, indeed, may not always derive its whole fubfiftence from the country in its neighbourhood, or even from the territory to which it belongs, but from very diftant countries; and this, though it forms no exception from the general rule, has occafioned confiderable variations in the progrefs of opulence in different ages and

nations.

That order of things which neceffity impofes in general, though not in every particular country, is, in every particular country, promoted by the natural inclinations of man. If human infti