400 FALLACIES. 



great employment to labour. B, who lives upon a 

 small portion, and invests the remainder in the funds, 

 is thought to give little or no employment. For every- 

 body sees the gains which are made by A's tradesmen, 

 servants, and others, while his money is spending. 

 B's savings, on the contrary, pass into the hands of 

 the person whose stock he purchased, who with it 

 pays a debt he owed to some banker, who lends it 

 again to some merchant or manufacturer; and' the 

 capital, being laid out in hiring spinners and weavers, 

 or carriers and the crews of merchant vessels, not 

 only gives immediate employment to as much in- 

 dustry at once as A employs during the whole of his 

 career, but coming back with increase by the sale of 

 the goods which have been manufactured or imported, 

 form a fund for the employment of the same and 

 perhaps a greater quantity of labour in perpetuity. 

 But the careless observer does not see, and therefore 

 does not consider, what becomes of B's money; he 

 does see what is done with A's: he observes the 

 amount of industry which A's profusion feeds; he 

 observes not the far greater quantity which it pre- 

 vents from being fed : and thence the prejudice, uni- 

 versal to the time of Adam Smith, and even yet only 

 exploded among persons more than commonly in- 

 structed, that prodigality encourages industry, and 

 parsimony is a discouragement to it. 



The common argument against free-trade is a fal- 

 lacy of the same nature. The purchaser of British 

 silk encourages British industry ; the purchaser of 

 Lyons silk encourages only French ; the former con- 

 duct is patriotism, the latter ought to be interdicted by 

 law. The circumstance is overlooked, that the pur- 

 chaser of any foreign commodity of necessity causes, 

 directly or indirectly, the export of an equivalent 



