ports of the Mediterranean, and some
trade of the same kind carried on by British
merchants between the different parts 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 surplus produce
of all those distant places within the
country which have occasion to exchange their
respective productions with one another; that
of the foreign trade of consumption, by the
value of the surplus produce of the whole
country, and of what can be purchased with
it; that of the carrying trade, by the value of
the surplus produce of all the different countries
in the world. Its possible extent, therefore,
is in a manner infinite in comparison of
that of the other two, and is capable of absorbing
the greatest capitals.
The consideration of his own private profit
is the sole motive which determines the owner
of any capital to employ it either in agriculture,
in manufactures, or in some 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 society, 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 employments, and
farming and improving the most direct roads
to a splendid fortune, the capitals of individuals
will naturally be employed in the manner
most advantageous to the whole society.
The profits of agriculture, however, seem to
have no superiority over those of other employments
in any part of Europe. Projectors,
indeed, in every corner of it, have, within
these 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 discussion
of their calculations, a very simple observation
may satisfy us that the result of them
must be false. We see, every day, the most
splendid fortunes, that have been acquired in
the course of a single life, by trade and manufactures,
frequently from a very small capital,
sometimes from no capital. A single instance
of such a fortune, acquired by agriculture
in the same time, and from such a capital,
has not, perhaps, occurred in Europe, during
the course of the present 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 absorbing 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 so great an advantage over that
which is carried on in the country, that private
persons frequently find it more for their advantage
to employ their capitals in the most
distant carrying trades of Asia 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.