¥.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 161 
hold which the current Nature philosophy had on men’s minds that Hume, 
whose own theism was of the most tenuous and hesitating character, puts 
the conclusion in theistic language : ‘ These numberless bars, obstructions 
and imposts which all nations of Europe . . . have put upon trade... 
deprive neighbouring nations of that free communication and exchange 
which the Author of the world has intended by giving them soils, climates 
and geniuses so different from each other.’ 
It need hardly be said that this religious interpretation long continued 
to be usual. As the great financier Alexander Baring, later known as Lord 
Ashburton, declared, in presenting the Merchants’ Petition to the House of 
Commons in 1820: ‘It is one of the wise dispensations of Providence to 
give to different parts of the world different climates and different advan- 
tages, probably with the great moral purpose of bringing human beings 
together for the mutual relief of their wants.’ 4 
“Natural advantages,’ it will be allowed, will commonly be taken to 
mean advantages based on geographical conditions. This is what the 
reader, left to himself, would understand by Ricardo’s language, when he 
says that ‘a system of perfectly free commerce’ uses most efficaciously 
“the peculiar powers bestowed by nature’; #2 or by Cobden’s language, 
thirty years later, when he speaks of England as setting ‘ the example of 
giving the whole world every advantage of clime and latitude and situa- 
tion.’ 4% 
Smith is avowedly taking a strong case when he remarks that ‘ by means 
of glasses, hot-beds and hot walls very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, 
and very good wine too can be made of them—at about thirty times the 
expense at which they can be imported.’ 44 But, if this is an extreme 
- case, it is something equally clear in essential character, though usually 
— —- 
less in degree, that the phrase ‘ natural advantages ’ is calculated to imply. 
And this is how Ricardo himself interprets it: ‘ It is this principle which 
determines that wine shall be made in France and Portugal, that corn shall 
be grown in America and Poland, and that hardware and other goods shall 
be manufactured in England.’ * 
It will be remembered that Ricardo was writing in 1817: it was 
then thought that English hardware rested upon natural blessings in the 
way of coal and iron which other nations did not possess. The‘ natural 
advantages’ which the United States and Germany, to mention no other 
countries, were destined to find in their coal and iron deposits had not yet 
been discovered. As late as 1832 McCulloch could write in his ‘Dictionary 
of Commerce’: ‘The hardware manufacture is one of the most important 
41 Hansard (N.S.) I., p. 165, quoted in Page, Commerce and Industry (1919), I., 55. 
42 Chap. vii., on Foreign Trade. 
48 Speech of Feb. 27, 1846. A contemporary variant is ‘ varieties of climate, 
situation and soil,’ in the Hdinburgh Review for Jan. 1841 (a reference I owe to the late 
Professor Sidgwick). In Thorold Rogers we find a fresh spring of fervour derived 
_ from Cobden and Bastiat. The chapter on Foreign Trade in his Manual (1868) thus 
begins: ‘ The various regions of the earth are variously favourable to the growth of 
vegetable and animal products. Different countries too have different geological 
characteristics.’ The exposition of ‘special advantages’ by the economist who 
replaced Rogers in the Oxford chair is on the same lines: Bonamy Price, Practical 
Political Economy (1878), p. 309. 
44 TI, p. 31. 
45 Principles, p. 157. 
1924 M 
