148 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. [March, 



and that is, the abandonment and disuse of these kixuries until 

 we are able and have the means to pay for them ; or by honest 

 and productive industry, acquiring the means to pay for them. 

 / The notions, too, entertained by many, of our making raw 

 silk an article of export, and of our undertaking to supply 

 Great Britain and France at an enormous profit, with a large 

 amount of the millions of pounds of raw silk which they 

 consume, seem closely bordering upon visionary. We can- 

 not, even had we produced a large surplus, come into the 

 European market with our silk without coming in competition 

 with the cheap labor of Italy, France, Germany, India and 

 China. Besides this, the culture of silk, with the advantages 

 of the improved varieties of mulberry, has made an auspicious 

 beginning in the Sandwich Islands, and large contracts for 

 trees, if report be true, have been made in the British West 

 India Islands, where the climate admits of getting three to four 

 crops per year. Now", under such circumstances, is it to be 

 supposed that we can go largely into the cultivation of silk 

 with any expectation of prices remaining as they are. There 

 is another law of trade, which necessarily applies itself here. 

 In the first production of some extraordinary article, it may 

 command a high price ; or where by any peculiarity of loca- 

 tion or any peculiar art or skill in cultivation, it can be pro- 

 duced with a degree of perfection, to which other persons or 

 other places cannot attain, there a sort of monopoly may exist, 

 and a high price be maintained. But an article of general 

 production, and which may be grown to an unlimited extent, in 

 almost an unlimited number of places will ordinarily bear a price 

 proportioned to the cost of production and but little above it. 

 If it fall below the cost of production, it will cease to be culti- 

 vated ; if it rise much above it and pay the large profits with 

 which alone the imaginations of some men can be satisfied, an 

 extended production, stimulated by this high price, will soon 

 bring it down to its level. It is worse than idle to delude 

 ourselves with false expectations. The laws which regulate 

 the affairs of men, which are indeed none other than the laws 

 of Divine Providence, and which extend to all the departments 



