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 society
is that carried on between the inhabitants of
the town and those of the country. It consists
in the exchange of rude for manufactured
produce, either immediately, or by the intervention
of money, or of some sort of paper
which represents money. The country supplies
the town with the means of subsistence
and the materials of manufacture. The town
repays this supply, by sending 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 said to gain its
whole wealth and subsistence from the country.
We must not, however, upon this account,
imagine that the gain of the town is the
loss of the country. The gains of both are
mutual and reciprocal, and the division of labour
is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous
to all the different persons employed in
the various occupations into which it is subdivided.
The inhabitants of the country purchase
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 surplus 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 something
else which is in demand among them.
The greater the number and revenue of the
inhabitants of the town, the more extensive is
the market which it affords to those 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, sells there for the same price with
that which comes from twenty miles distance.
But the price of the latter must, generally,
not only pay the expense of raising it 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 sell, the whole value of the carriage of
the like produce that is brought from more
distant parts; and they save, besides, the whole
value of this carriage in the price of what they
buy. Compare the cultivation of the lands in
the neighbourhood of any considerable town,
with that of those which lie at some distance
from it, and you will easily satisfy yourself
how much the country is benefited by the commerce
of the town. Among all the absurd
speculations that have been propagated concerning
the balance of trade, it has never been
pretended that either the country loses by its
commerce with the town, or the town by that
with the country which maintains it.
As subsistence is, in the nature of things,
prior to conveniency and luxury, so the industry
which procures the former, must necessarily
be prior to that which ministers to the
latter. The cultivation and improvement of
the country, therefore, which affords subsistence,
must, necessarily, be prior to the increase
of the town, which furnishes only the
means of conveniency and luxury. It is the
surplus produce of the country only, or what
is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators,
that constitutes the subsistence of the
town, which can therefore increase only with
the increase of the surplus produce. The
town, indeed, may not always derive its whole
subsistence from the country in its neighbourhood,
or even from the territory to which it
belongs, but from very distant countries; and
this, though it forms no exception from the
general rule, has occasioned considerable variations
in the progress of opulence in different
ages and nations.
That order of things which necessity imposes,
in general, though not in every particular