gold and silver, its prohibition and restriction of the importation of those commodities which are supposed to occasion an unfavourable balance of trade, or, in other words, a trade in which the precious metals are exported, and its bounties on the exportation of those commodities which are supposed to be paid for in gold and silver, and its attempts to render us independent, as it is termed, of foreign nations, by forcing us to produce at home what could be obtained better or more abundantly from abroad; in which of these attempts, and they constitute its essence, does the mercantile system differ from the conduct of my supposed children? If nothing should occur to check the world in its present state of improvement, and 1000 years hence, when all traces of the mercantile system which at present clogs all our actions, and disturbs all our reasonings, shall have vanished, when the rulers of every nation shall permit their subjects to use to the utmost their own advantages, and profit to the utmost of the advantages possessed by their

neighbours; if, in that millenium of good sense, a copy of these lectures shall be discovered, I shall be considered probably a recluse academic, totally unacquainted with the real business of the world, and declaiming from my cloister against opinions and conduct too monstrous to have had any but a visionary existence in my own imagination.

I need not give myself much trouble about the opinion of posterity, but my present hearers have a right to require from me some account of the causes that enabled a set of opinions which do not even admit of being plausibly stated, to prevail so universally, and to remain for so many centuries unquestioned. I am inclined to ascribe their immediate origin more to the use of money as a measure of value than to its use as a medium of exchange. A man possessed of an extraordinary number of valuable things is rich; but the clearest mode of stating his comparative wealth is to state the aggregate of the sums of money for which all his possessions would sell. We say, perhaps,

that he has 100,000 pounds; meaning that such is the aggregate amount of the sums of money for which all his property might be sold. When applied to an individual this language leads to no misapprehension. We know that the person whom we have described as possessing 100,000 pounds does not in fact possess twenty; that he does not habitually keep with him as much money as a petty shopkeeper of not one tenth or one hundredth of his fortune. And we are quite aware that if we could force him to increase the money in his custody to ten times its usual amount, we should impoverish rather than enrich him. But when men reason upon national wealth, they seem to forget that it is merely the aggregate of the wealth possessed by individuals. Their minds are confused by its magnitude and complexity; because the wealth of a nation, like the separate masses of which it is composed, may be computed in money, they suppose that it consists of money; -a mistake as gross, and perhaps as natural, as that of a child who, hearing that a given

merchant had 100,000 pounds, should suppose that he had a box containing that sum in gold and silver.

When this strange misapprehension of the nature of wealth had prevailed, I have no doubt that it was indebted for its continuance principally to the impossibility of reducing its principles to practice. We have seen that to sell without buying, or even to continue selling more than you buy, that is, to effect the object proposed by the mercantile system, the forcing a constantly favourable balance of trade, is impracticable. But if it had been practicable to a given extent and for a given time; if by force of prohibitions, restrictions and bounties, we had been able for twenty years together to make our exports exceed in value our imports, to the amount, we will say, of five millions sterling, and to receive and retain the balance, we should have found ourselves in time possessed of a hundred millions sterling in gold and silver, in addition to our money previously in circulation, which has never probably exceeded forty mil

lions. It is difficult to say to what extent such an addition to our currency, uncalled for by any previous deficiency, would have raised the prices of all English commodities, and how low its abstraction from the currencies of the rest of the world would have sunk the prices of all foreign commodities. It is evident, however, that the rise here and the fall abroad, must have been such as to be inconsistent with the continuance of foreign commerce. When we found ourselves deprived not only of foreign luxuries and comforts, of wine, tea and sugar, but of the materials of our most essential arts, of cotton, deals and hemp, and repaid only by the pleasure of using five sovereigns to make a purchase which might have been previously effected by one, such a reductio ad absurdum would have been irresistible. We should have instantly seen the necessity of rather allowing our superfluous money to be exported, than of remaining like Midas, abundantly provided with gold, but in want of food, raiment and shelter. It is precisely because the object of the mercantile sys