THE WEALTH OE NATIONS.

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governments. To form a right judgment of it, indeed, we mustcompare the state of the country at periods somewhat distantfrom one another. The progress is frequently so gradual, thatat near periods, the improvement is not only not sensible, butfrom the declension either of certain branches of industry, or ofcertain districts of the country, things which sometimes hap-pen though the country in general be in great prosperity,there frequently arises a suspicion, that the riches and indus-try of the whole are decaying.

The annual produce of the land and labour of England,for example, is certainly much greater than it was, a littlemore than a century ago at the restoration of Charles II .Though, at present, few people, I believe, doubt of this, yetduring this period, five years have seldom passed away inwhich some book or pamphlet has not been published, writ-ten too with such abilities as to gain some authority with thepublic, and pretending to demonstrate that the wealth of thenation was fast declining, that the country was depopulated,agriculture neglected, manufactures decaying, and trade un-done. Nor have these publications been all party pamphlets,the wretched offspring of falsehood and venality. Many ofthem have been written by very candid and very intelligentpeople; who wrote nothing but what they believed, and forno other reason but because they believed it.

The annual produce of the land and labour of Englandagain was certainly much greater at the restoration than wecan suppose it to have been about an hundred years before,at the accession of Elizabeth. At this period too, we haveall reason to believe, the country was much more advancedin improvement, than it had been about a century before,towards the close ol the dissensions between the houses ofYork and Lancaster. Even then it was, probably, in a bettercondition than it had been at the Norman conquest , andat the Norman conquest , than during the confusion of theSaxon Heptarchy. Even at this early period, it was certainlya more improved country than at the invasion of JuliusCaesar , when its inhabitants were nearly in the same statewith the savages iu North America .

In each of those periods, however, there was not only muchprivate and public profusion, many expensive and unneces-sary wars, great (perversion of the annual produce frommaintaining productive to maintain unproductive hands; butsometimes, in the confusion of civil discord, such absolute