an exorbitant profit to himself. They endeavoured,
therefore, to annihilate his trade altogether.
They even endeavoured to hinder, as
much as possible, any middle man of any
kind from coming in between the grower and
the consumer; and this was the meaning of
the many restraints which they imposed upon
the trade of those whom they called kidders,
or carriers of corn; a trade which nobody was
allowed to exercise without a licence, ascertaining
his qualifications as a man of probity and
fair dealing. The authority of three justices of
the peace was, by the statute of Edward VI.
necessary in order to grant this licence. But
even this restraint was afterwards thought insufficient,
and, by a statute of Elizabeth, the
privilege of granting it was confined to the
quarter-sessions.
The ancient policy of Europe endeavoured,
in this manner, to regulate agriculture, the
great trade of the country, by maxims quite
different from those which it established with
regard to manufactures, the great trade of the
towns. By leaving a farmer no other customers
but either the consumers or their immediate
factors, the kidders and carriers of corn,
it endeavoured to force him to exercise the
trade, not only of a farmer, but of a corn merchant,
or corn retailer. On the contrary, it,
in many cases, prohibited the manufacturer
from exercising the trade of a shopkeeper, or
from selling his own goods by retail. It
meant, by the one law, to promote the general
interest of the country, or to render corn
cheap, without, perhaps, its being well understood
how this was to be done. By the other,
it meant to promote that of a particular order
of men, the shopkeepers, who would be so
much undersold by the manufacturer, it was
supposed, that their trade would be ruined,
if he was allowed to retail at all.
The manufacturer, however, though he had
been allowed to keep a shop, and to sell his
own goods by retail, could not have undersold
the common shopkeeper. Whatever part of
his capital he might have placed in his shop,
he must have withdrawn it from his manufacture.
In order to carry on his business on a
level with that of other people, as he must
have had the profit of a manufacturer on the
one part, so he must have had that of a shopkeeper
upon the other. Let us suppose, for
example, that in the particular town where he
lived, ten per cent. was the ordinary profit
both of manufacturing and shopkeeping stock;
he must in this case have charged upon every
piece of his own goods, which he sold in his
shop, a profit of twenty per cent. When he
carried them from his workhouse to his shop,
he must have valued them at the price for
which he could have sold them to a dealer or
shopkeeper, who would have bought them by
wholesale. If he valued them lower, he lost
a part of the profit of his manufacturing capital.
When, again, he sold them from his
shop, unless he got the same price at which a
shopkeeper would have sold them, he lost a
part of the profit of his shopkeeping capital.
Though he might appear, therefore, to make
a double profit upon the same piece of goods,
yet, as these goods made successively a part
of two distinct capitals, he made but a single
profit upon the whole capital employed about
them; and if he made less than his profit, he
was a loser, and did not employ his whole capital
with the same advantage as the greater
of part of his neighbours.
What the manufacturer was prohibited to
do, the farmer was in some measure enjoined
to do; to divide his capital between two different
employments; to keep one part of it
in his granaries and stack-yard, for supplying
the occasional demands of the market, and to
employ the other in the cultivation of his
land. But as he could not afford to employ
the latter for less than the ordinary profits of
farming stock, so he could as little afford to
employ the former for less than the ordinary
profits of mercantile stock. Whether the stock
which really carried on the business of a corn
merchant belonged to the person who was
called a farmer, or to the person who was called
a corn merchant, an equal profit was in
both cases requisite, in order to indemnify its
owner for employing it in this manner, in
order to put his business on a level with other
trades, and in order to hinder him from having
an interest to change it as soon as possible
for some other. The farmer, therefore,
who was thus forced to exercise the trade of
a corn merchant, could not afford to sell his
corn cheaper than any other corn merchant
would have been obliged to do in the case
a free competition.
The dealer who can employ his whole stock
in one single branch of business, has an advantage
of the same kind with the workman
who can employ his whole labour in one single
operation. As the latter acquires a dexterity
which enables him, with the same two hands,
to perform a much greater quantity of work,
so the former acquires so easy and ready a
method of transacting his business, of buying
and disposing of his goods, that, with the same
capital he can transact a much greater quantity
of business. As the one can commonly
afford his work a good deal cheaper, so the
other can commonly afford his goods somewhat
cheaper, than if his stock and attention
were both employed about a greater variety of
objects. The greater part of manufacturers
could not afford to retail their own goods so
cheap as a vigilant and active shopkeeper,
whose sole business it was to buy them by
wholesale and to retail them again. The
greater part of farmers could still less afford
to retail their own corn, to supply the inhabitants
of a town, at perhaps four or five miles
distance from the greater part of them, so
cheap as a vigilant and active corn merchant,