tem is unattainable, because a balance of trade universally favourable cannot be created under ordinary circumstances, or, if created, could not, under ordinary circumstances, be retained for a month, that the absurdity of this system remained so long undetected, and is still generally unacknowledged. It follows a will-o'-thewisp, which can remain an object of pursuit only so long as its real nature is unknown.

But, it may be said, granting the delusion as to the practicability and the utility of the end proposed by the mercantile system to have been universal, and universal it certainly was, and almost continues to be, yet as the means are so clearly productive of immediate injury, how came they to be so readily acceded to? How comes it that any departure from them is submitted to with such reluctance? How comes it that people are so anxious, in this instance alone, to sacrifice immediate to the hope of future benefit; to submit eagerly to general and immediate privation in the hope of a national benefit hereafter?

The answer is, that though restrictions and prohibitions of importation, and bounties on exportation, always occasion public loss, they produce, or are supposed to produce, individual gain. And the preponderance in amount of the loss over the gain is more than compensated so far as either acts on public opinion, by the concentration of the gain, and the diffusion of the loss. A restriction or prohibition of the importation of any foreign commodity occasions a loss to those persons who would have produced the English commodity with which the 'excluded foreign commodity would have been purchased; but these are unascertained persons. No man feels that he is one of the persons peculiarly entitled to complain. It occasions also a loss to all those who are forced to purchase the dearer or the inferior English commodity. But though the sum of these inconveniences is most oppressive, the evil in each particular instance is generally trifling. On the other hand the producer of the English commodity, for which the foreign one might be

a substitute, is an ascertained person fully estimating, and generally over estimating, the loss to which the admission of a rival would subject him, and if possible exaggerating his own terrors in his expression of them.

Nothing but inquiry into the details of our commercial law will convince those among my hearers to whom the subject is not familiar, how trifling may be the individual gain that is offered and admitted as an effectual counterpoise to a public loss. We submit to a loss, exceeding probably a million sterling every year, occasioned by the restriction on the importation of Baltic timber; and voluntarily inoculate our houses with dry rot, lest sawmills in Canada, and ships in the North American timber trade, the aggregate value of which does not amount to a million sterling, should become less productive to their owners. We prohibit sugar refined in the colonies, and consequently import it in a state more bulky and more perishable, lest the profits of a few sugar refiners should be lessened. Other selfishness

may be as intense, but none is so unblushing, because none is so tolerated, as that of a monopolist claiming a vested interest in a public injury.

The subject is still further obscured by that powerful instrument of confusion, national jealousy. Free trade is not only to deprive us of our money, it is also to carry it to our neighbours; it is to do worse than impoverish ourselves, it is to enrich them. The trade with a country is likely to be advantageous in proportion to its extent, productiveness and proximity. The trade between Middlesex and Kent is more advantageous to both parties than that between Middlesex and Caithness. But those very circumstances are the causes of national jealousy. The trade between Great Britain and France would be the most beneficial that either country could carry on: they are countries of great extent and powers of production; their respective wants and supplies are happily adapted to each other, and the short sea, which, for commercial purposes, rather unites than

separates them, reduces the expense of carriage almost to nothing. The wines of the Garronne would naturally be cheaper in London than in Paris. The mineral treasures of Wales and Cornwall would find their way as easily to the Loire as to the Thames. For these very reasons each nation has always exercised her perverse ingenuity to exclude the commodities of her neighbour. And so well have they succeeded that the imports of Great Britain from France, instead of forming, as they naturally would do, a third or fourth of all our imports, do not exceed a fiftieth. The mercantile system seems to have proclaimed, and national jealousy to have re-echoed,

Nequicquam Deus abscidit

Prudens oceano dissociabili

Terras, si tamen impiæ

Non tangenda rates transiliunt vada.

Another most efficient fallacy consists in a use of the word "independent." To be independent of foreign supply, in consequence of the abundance of our own, is unquestionably a