MANUFACTURES. 241 



agricultural and manufacturing cjasses are incited to greater 

 industry. Agriculture never arrives at any considerable, 

 much less at its highest, degree of perfection, where it is 

 not connected with trade, that is, where the demand for the 

 produce is not increased by the consumption of trading 

 cities. But it should be remembered that agriculture is the 

 immediate source of human provision ; that trade conduces 

 to the production of provision only as it promotes agricul- 

 ture ; and that the whole system of commerce, vast and 

 various as it is, has no other public importance than its sub- 

 serviency to this end. 



Manufactures are the arts by which natural productions 

 are brought into the state or form in which they are con- 

 sumed or used. Tliey require in general great expenses 

 for their first establishment, costly machines for shortening 

 manual labour, and money and credit for purchasing mate- 

 rials from distant countries. There is not a single manu- 

 facture of Great Britain which does not require, in some 

 part of its process, productions from the different parts of 

 the globe; it requires, therefore, ships and a friendly inter- 

 course with foreign nations, to transport commodities and 

 exchange productions. They would not be a manufacturing 

 unless they were a commercial nation. 



The two sciences which most assist the manufacturer, are 

 mechanics and chemistry ; — the one for building mills, 

 working mines, and in general for constructing machines, 

 either to shorten the labour of man by performing it in less 

 time, or to perform what the strength of man alone could 

 not accomplish ; the other for fusing and working ores, for 

 dyeing and bleaching, and extracting the virtues of various 

 substances for particular occasions. 



It is more common to see merchants and manufacturers 

 accumulate large and rapid fortunes than farmers. They 

 are a class who generally employ capital upon a much larger 

 scale, hence their riches make a greater show. Yet, upon 

 the whole, trade and manufactures do not yield greater 

 profits than agriculture. It must be observed that though a 

 farmer does not so frequently and rapidly amass wealth as a 

 merchant, yet neither is he so often ruined The risks a 

 man encounters in trade are much greater than in farming. 

 The merchant is liable to severe losses arising from contin- 

 gencies in trade ; he must have therefore a chance of making 

 2J 



