THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

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in a still greater proportion. During the sixteenth century,the Portuguese were the only European nation who carriedon any regular trade to the East Indies. In the last years ofthat century the Dutch began to encroach upon this monopoly,and in a few years expelled them from their principal settle-ments in India . During the greater part of the last cen-tury, those two nations divided the most considerable part ofthe East India trade between them; the trade of the Dutch .continually augmenting in a still greater proportion than thatof the Portuguese declined. The English and French car-ried on some trade with India in the last century, but it hasbeen greatly augmented in the course of the present. TheEast India trade of the Swedes and Danes began in the courseof the present century. Even the Muscovites now trade re-gularly with China by a sort of caravans which go overlandthrough Siberia and Tartary to Pekin. The East India tradeof all these nations, if we except that of the French , whichthe last war had well nigh annihilated, has been almost con-tinually augmenting. The increasing consumption of EastIndia goods in Europe is, it seems, so great, as to afford agradual increase of employment to them all. Tea, for ex-ample, was a drug very little used in Europe before themiddle of the last century. At present the value of the teaannually imported by the English East India Company , forthe use of their own countrymen, amounts to more than amillion and a half a year; and even this is not enough ; agreat deal more being constantly smuggled into the countryfrom the ports of Holland, from Gottenburg in Sweden , andfrom the coast of France too, as long as the French East IndiaCompany was in prosperity. The consumption of the porce-lain of China, of the spiceries of the Moluccas , of the piecegoods of Bengal, and of innumerable other articles, has in-creased very nearly in a like proportion. The tonnage ac-cordingly of all the European shipping employed in theEast India trade, at any one time during the last century, wasnot, perhaps, much greater than that of the English East IndiaCompany before the late reduction of their shipping.

But in the East Indies, particularly in China and Indostan,the value of the precious metals, when the Europeans firstbegan to trade to those countries, was much higher than inEurope ; and it still continues to be so. In rice countries,which generally yield two, sometimes three crops in the year,each of them more plentiful than any common crop of corn,

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