1020.] Mr. Huskissmi's Colonial Trade Bill, 1025. 261 



curious declaration, we conceive, to the equal members of the same 

 community the common participators of the same " glorious constitu- 

 tion I" Had Lord Chatham told that integral part of the British empire, 

 the colonial-nurtured city of Bristol, it had no right to manufacture its 

 own glass, but must purchase it from the West-India colonies, we 

 wonder with what grace the Bristolians would have received this decla- 

 ration of parental and even-handed justice ! ! 



Now, however extensive was the opinion we have noticed to have 

 been once entertained, that the value of colonial trading was to be found 

 alone in the vent which it gave to the productions of the mother coun- 

 try, and by however high authority that opinion has been supported, a 

 moment's reflection will make it obvious to the meanest capacity that 

 this, instead of being in itself an end of foreign trade, is only the means 

 to the attainment of a widely different object. Mankind are the creatures 

 of want and desire; and experience has taught them that they can 

 accomplish more abundant gratification of their wants and desires by a 

 distribution of industry, confining each individual to employ that com- 

 mand over labour with which his capital invests him in the production 

 of some one commodity, as a means to the attainment of others, rather 

 than by producing those others for himself. 



It is plain, then, that the employment of capital possesses in itself no 

 intrinsic advantage. It is beneficial only because, through its interven- 

 tion, its employer is enabled to obtain the productions of others. If all, or 

 any, of the objects of desire to the individuals of a community are capa- 

 ble of production within its own limits, and with greater facility than 

 they can be supplied from without, it will be the interest of the com- 

 munity to supply its consumers from within, with so many as are capable 

 of such production ; if otherwise, interest would dictate a resort for 

 their attainment to any foreign countries which might possess the 

 assumed superiority. To accomplish this, an adequate proportion of the 

 productions of the community would be exported as the instruments of 

 purchase; but here it is obvious their exportation could be no more than 

 the means : acquisition of the produce of the foreign country would be 

 the only object of the transaction. The manufacturers and merchants 

 engaged in ministering to the traffic would, as owners of produce, 

 become, in common with the community at large, gainers by a state of 

 things which enabled a smaller amount of production to purchase what, 

 under other circumstances, must have required a larger ; but in no other 

 respect would they benefit by such an extension of their market. Exten- 

 sion of market, though widening the field, possesses in itself no power to 

 increase the quantity of trading. This is always governed by the 

 amount of capital capable of embarkation in it ; and it will be imme- 

 diately perceived that the dealings of him whose capital restricts him to- 

 the production of commodities of the value of 5,000/., can derive no 

 enlargement of trading beyond that amount from the proximity of a market 

 adequate to the absorption of articles of the value of 50,000/. But for 

 the existence of this foreign traffic, as well the capital employed in fur- 

 nishing the instrument of exchange, as the amount of capital saved by 

 the operation, would have been employed in producing at home the object 

 of desire, thus more advantageously procured from abroad. To that 

 production capital would have been allured by a return of the average 

 rate of profit ; but in foreign, as well as in every other description of 

 commerce, the competition of merchants would, in the long-run, pre- 



