174 ADAM SMITH. 



being thus kept unnaturally high, has necessarily been 

 hurtful to its trade with all other countries. Dr. Smith, 

 likewise contends, that the monopoly draws capital from 

 a foreign trade of consumption with foreign countries 

 yielding quick returns, to a similar trade with distant 

 countries yielding slow returns; that it draws capital 

 from a direct to a round-about foreign trade of consump- 

 tion; and that it draws some capital from all trade of 

 consumption to a carrying trade. In these respects he 

 holds the colonial monopoly to have been greatly pre- 

 judicial. Lastly, he considers it a disadvantage that 

 this great branch of commerce occasions our manu- 

 factures not to be adapted to a variety of small markets 

 but to one or two large ones, destroying the uniform and 

 equal balance that would naturally have taken place 

 among the different employments of capital, and thus 

 diminishing the great security derived from a moderate 

 amount of capital being invested in a great number of 

 trades, of which if one should fail, another may be 

 expected to succeed. 



It is not to be denied, that a great portion of Dr. 

 Smith's objections to the colonial monopoly are well 

 founded. The object of that monopoly is to overcome 

 the natural effects of distance and severance, and to 

 render the remote territory, situated at the other extre- 

 mity of the globe, a portion of the mother country's 

 European dominions. But even if such be its object, 

 it is treating the colony unlike any other part of the 

 parent State's dominions, to forbid all trade between its 

 people and foreign States, and to confine its commercial 

 existence to its relations with the rest of the empire. 

 No one ever thought of compelling Lancashire or Devon- 



