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T11K NATURE AND CAUSES OE

waste and destruction of stock, as might be supposed, not onlyto retard, as it certainly did, the natural accumulation ofriches, but to have left the country, at the end of the period,poorer than at the beginning. Thus, in the happiest andmost fortunate period of them all, that which has passedsince the restoration, how many disorders and misfortuneshave occurred, which, could they have been foreseen, notonly the impoverishment, but the total ruin of the countrywould have been expected from them ? The fire and the plagueof London, the two Dutch wars, the disorders of the revolu-tion, the war in Ireland, the four expensive French wars of1688, 1702, 1742, and 1756, together with the two rebel-lions of 1715, and 1745. In the course of the four French wars, the nation has contracted more than a hundred andforty-five millions of debt, over and above all the other ex-traordinary annual expense which they occasioned, so thatthe whole cannot be computed at less than two hundred mil-lions. So great a share of the annual produce of the landand labour of the country, has, since the revolution, been em-ployed upon different occasions, in maintaining an extraor-dinary number of unproductive hands. But had not thosewars given this particular direction to so large a capital, thegreater part of it would naturally have been employed inmaintaining productive hands, whose labour would havereplaced, with a profit, the whole value of their consump-tion. The value of the annual produce of the land andlabour of the country, would have been considerably in-creased by it every year, and every year’s increase wouldhave augmented still more that of the following year. Morehouses would have been built, more lands would havebeen improved, and those which had been improved beforewould have been better cultivated, more manufactures wouldhave been established, and those which had been establishedbefore would have been more extended; and to what heightthe real wealth and revenue of the country might, by thistime, have been raised, it is not perhaps very easy even toimagine.

But though the profusion of government must, undoubt-edly, have retarded the natural progress of England towardswealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it. Theannual produce of its land and labour is, undoubtedly, muchgreater at present than it was either at the restoration or atthe revolution. The capital, therefore, annually employed