102 NOTES ON ECONOMICAL SCIENCE. 



Trade Review, which we must suppose to have some support amidst 

 the mercantile community of that great city, having expressed itself in 

 the following words : "During the last ten or twelve years the con- 

 sumption of the Province has outridden the production by many mil- 

 lion dollars ; indeed we have been running into debt at the rate of some 

 eight or nine million dollars a year, as will be seen by reference to the 

 provincial import and export account. To conceive that such a course 

 can be forever pursued without producing national insolvency, would 

 be to condemn, as unsound, the principles established by all the great 

 writers on political economy. A colony — and especially a new and 

 not wealthy colony — cannot afPord, any more than an individual, to 

 spend a dollar and only earn seventy-five cents, without ultimately 

 coming to grief." This passage, mistaken in its facts anil in its reas- 

 oning, and founded on ideas belonging altogether to the past, is quoted 

 with the highest approbation in the Journal of the Board of Arts and 

 Manufactures for Hpper Canada, the use made of it appearing from 

 the following words : " It (the Trade Review) does not, as is the case 

 with most of our politital newspapers, point to the large imports of 

 wholesale merchants as evidence of the country's prosperity, but warns 

 the people that if we continue to import so largely in excess of our 

 exports, as we have been doing for many years past, it will inevitably 

 lead to national insolvency ; and instead of depreciating the efforts of 

 those who desire to make this a manufacturing as well as an agricultu- 

 ral country, as is the wont of many of our public writers, shows that it 

 13 utterly impossible for us to be prosperous unless we manufacture 

 much more largely than we now do, and thus employ our surplus and 

 unproductive labour, and heep capital in the country.'^ 



It is pleasant to learn from this writer that the public press gener- 

 ally is too enlightened to sanction such fallacious and dangerous 

 notions, but the occurrence of such a passage in a work of such 

 authority as I have quoted, emanating from a Board constituted by 

 the government and which must be acknowledged to have accom- 

 plished very much good in proportion to its means, and in its Journal to 

 diffuse a great amount of practically useful knowledge, is quite enough 

 to show that the discussion of these subjects is needed amongst us. 

 The passage quoted leads us to another important question, the at- 

 tempt to make this a manufacturing as well as an agricultural country. 

 We must in the first place distinctly understand what this attempt 

 means. No country whatever is exclusively engaged in agriculture. 



