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T1IE NATUltE AND CAUSES OF

that private persons frequently find it more for their advan-tage to employ their capitals in the most distant carryingtrades of Asia and America , than in the improvement andcultivation of the most fertile fields in their own neighbour-hood, I shall endeavour to explain in the two following books.

BOOK III.

OF THE DIFFERENT PROGRESS OF OPULENCE INDIFFERENT NATIONS.

CHAP. I.

Of the natural Progress of Opulence.

The great commerce of every civilized society is that car-ried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of thecountry. It consists in the exchange of rude for manufac-tured produce, either immediately, or by the Intervention ofmoney, or of some sort of paper which represents money.The country supplies the town with the means of subsistenceand the materials of manufacture. The town repays thissupply by sending back a part of the manufactured produceto the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which thereneither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, mayvery properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsist-ence from the country. Wc must not, however, upon thisaccount, imagine that the gain of the town is the loss of thecountry. The gains of both are ihutual and reciprocal, andthe division of labour is in this, as in all other cases, advan-tageous to all the different persons employed in the variousoccupations into which it is subdivided. The inhabitants ofthe country purchase of the town a greater quantity of manu-factured goods with the produce of a much smaller quantityof their own labour, than they must have employed had theyattempted to prepare them themselves. The town affords amarket for the surplus produce of the country, or what is overand above the maintenance of the cultivators, and it is therethat the inhabitants of the country exchange it for somethingelse which is in demand among them. The greater the num-ber and revenue of the inhabitants of the town, the more ex-tensive is the market which it affords to those of the country;and the more extensive that market, it is always the more

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