soldiers, I have frequently heard it observed,
are at first debauched by the cheapness and
novelty of good wine; but after a few months
residence, the greater part of them become as
sober as the rest of the inhabitants. Were
the duties upon foreign wines, and the excises
upon malt, beer, and ale, to be taken
away all at once, it might, in the same manner,
occasion in Great Britain a pretty general
and temporary drunkenness among the
middling and inferior ranks of people, which
would probably be soon followed by a permanent
and almost universal sobriety. At present,
drunkenness is by no means the vice of
people of fashion, or of those who can easily
afford the most expensive liquors. A gentleman
drunk with ale has scarce ever been seen
among us. The restraints upon the wine trade
in Great Britain, besides, do not so much
seem calculated to hinder the people from going,
if I may say so, to the alehouse, as from
going where they can buy the best and cheapest
liquor. They favour the wine trade of
Portugal, and discourage that of France. The
Portuguese, it is said, indeed, are better customers
for our manufactures than the French,
and should therefore be encouraged in preference
to them. As they give us their custom,
it is pretended we should give them ours. The
sneaking arts of underling tradesman are thus
erected into political maxims for the conduct
of a great empire; for it is the most underling
tradesmen only who make it a rule to
employ chiefly their own customers. A great
trader purchases his goods always where they
are cheapest and best, without regard to any
little interest of this kind.
By such maxims as these, however, nations
have been taught that their interest consisted
in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation
has been made to look with an invidious
eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with
which it trades, and to consider their gain as
its own loss. Commerce, which ought naturally
to be, among nations as among individuals,
a bond of union and friendship, has become
the most fertile source of discord and
animosity. The capricious ambition of kings
and ministers has not, during the present and
the preceding century, been more fatal to the
repose of Europe, than the impertinent jealousy
of merchants and manufacturers. The
violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind
is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid,
the nature of human affairs can scarce admit
of a remedy: but the mean rapacity, the monopolizing
spirit, of merchants and manufacturers,
who neither are, nor ought to be, the
rulers of mankind, though it cannot, perhaps,
be corrected, may very easily be prevented
from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody
but themselves.
That it was the spirit of monopoly which
originally both invented and propagated this
doctrine, cannot be doubted: and they who
first taught it, were by no means such fools
as they who believed it. In every country it
always is, and must be, the interest of the
great body of the people, to buy whatever they
want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition
is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous
to take any pains to prove it; nor could
it ever have been called in question, had not
the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers
confounded the common sense of
mankind. Their interest is, in this respect,
directly opposite to that of the great body of
the people. As it is the interest of the freemen
of a corporation to hinder the rest of the
inhabitants from employing any workmen but
themselves; so it is the interest of the merchants
and manufacturers of every country to
secure to themselves the monopoly of the
home market. Hence, in Great Britain, and
in most other European countries, the extraordinary
duties upon almost all goods imported
by alien merchants. Hence the high duties
and prohibitions upon all those foreign
manufactures which can come into competition
with our own. Hence, too, the extraordinary
restraints upon the importation of almost
all sorts of goods from those countries
with which the balance of trade is supposed
to be disadvantageous; that is, from those
against whom national animosity happens to
be most violently inflamed.
The wealth of neighbouring nations, however,
though dangerous in war and politics, is
certainly advantageous in trade. In a state
of hostility, it may enable our enemies to
maintain fleets and armies superior to our
own; but in a state of peace and commerce,
it must likewise enable them to exchange with
us to a greater value, and to afford a better
market, either for the immediate produce of
our own industry, or for whatever is purchased
with that produce. As a rich man is likely
to be a better customer to the industrious people
in his neighbourhood, than a poor, so is
likewise a rich nation. A rich man, indeed,
who is himself a manufacturer, is a very dangerous
neighbour to all those who deal in the
same way. All the rest of the neighbourhood,
however, by far the greatest number, profit by
the good market which his expense affords
them. They even profit by his underselling
the poorer workmen who deal in the same way
with him. The manufacturers of a rich nation,
in the same manner, may no doubt be
very dangerous rivals to those of their neighbours.
This very competition, however, is
advantageous to the great body of the people,
who profit greatly, besides, by the good market
which the great expense of such a nation
affords them in every other way. Private
people, who want to make a fortune, never
think of retiring to the remote and poor provinces
of the country, but resort either to the
capital, or to some of the great commercial
towns. They know, that where little wealth