1831.] 
Division of Production and Commerce, 
145 
corresponding increase ; for we hare seen, that it never can be to the advantage 
of producers toigive a commercial class employment, unless they also are enriched, 
at the same time, by employing them. 
It has been usual to say, that commerce enriches individuals and nations, by 
giving each what is required more for what is required less. But this explanation 
does not appear to me to go to the bottom of the subject ; it shows only how 
people will be better accommodated after the exchange of their products, than 
they were before; and. not how they will be enriched; not only by obtaining 
what is better suited to their ultimate consumption, but by their obtaining also, 
m a quantity greatly increased, that which they respectively want ; and it gives 
no insight whatever into the nature of the new income which supports the addi- 
tional class in society, through whose means commercial interchanges are effected; 
and this appears to be a most weighty charge to bring against the theories of Politi- 
cal Economy which are now current ; for they all profess to give explanations of 
the nature of that enrichment which is consequent on commerce. 
When a class of merchants has come into being, and when, in consequence, 
production is accommodated to this new order of "things; these merchants, in 
place of being the mere hired carriers in which they have their origin, will, in 
time, take upon themselves the risk of disposing of what each producer yields, in 
excess to that which satisfies his own proper consumption, of his own peculiar 
commodities. They will, then, like the manufacturers, have it in their power, with 
reference to their own peculiar enrichment, to fix the prices at which they will 
sell to the ultimate consumers ; and like the manufacturers, they will find their 
markets extended in proportion as they lower the prices demanded, and they will 
find themselves enriched, only so long as the increasing number of sales, effected 
at a lower price, suffices more than to compensate, in the aggregate of gains, the 
reduction of price on each article sold. Indeed, as we shall now suppose, that no 
considerable commercial interchange is effected by the direct agency of the pro- 
ducers of the commodities bartered, we must look upon the determining of the 
price at which products can be sold, as depending not on how the classes of 
producers alone are most enriched, but on how these can obtain, together with 
this intermediate class, through whose instrumentality so much has been gained 
in productive power, the greatest aggregate of gain on the whole transaction. As, 
in the former case, there was no loss, but, on th6 contrary, a great gain to the 
community, by manufacturers permanently selling their wares at that price only 
which insured them the greatest aggregate of gain ; so, in the present case, the 
same principles will insure the greatest possible enrichment to all other classes, 
when the merchants also come into the receipt of the greatest possible aggregate 
of gain. The necessity for giving an income to a new class, has not rendered a 
greater payment necessary by the community, on each of their consumable com- 
modities : on the contrary, if this new class failed, not only to create a saving, or 
an increase equal to their own consumption, and equal to the enrichment of the 
classes of producers themselves ; it, like the carrier between the two agricultu- 
ralists of our former illustration, could never have been in employment. 
The obvious principle here elucidated does not, as I have said, appear to be 
known ; else it would not be laid down, as it is in the works of the popular writers of 
the day, that the only reason why gain should be obtainable by merchants, when 
these come between producers and ultimate consumers, is merely because these 
merchants have bestowed, in their business, a quantity of labour in the ordinary 
proportion to the gains they realize. If this were, indeed, the cause of the gains of 
merchants, then the same rule would hold good in favor of every person what- 
