TllF. WKAI.TH OK NATIONS.

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industry, to almost any foreign country; and what, perhaps,is of still greater importance, the unbounded liberty of trans-porting them from any one part of our own country to anyother, without being obliged to give any account to any publicoffice, without being liable to question or examination of anykind; but above all, that equal and impartial administrationof justice which renders the rights of the meanest British sub-ject respectable to the greatest, and which, by securing toevery man the fruits of his own industry, gives the greatestand most effectual encouragement to every sort of industry.

If the manufactures of Great Britain , however, have beenadvanced, as they certainly have, by the colony trade, it hasnot been by means of the monopoly of that trade, but in spiteof the monopoly. The effect of the monopoly has been, notto augment the quantity, but to alter the quality and shape ofa part of the manufactures of Great Britain , and to accommo-date to a market, from which the returns are slow and distant,what would otherwise have been accommodated to one fromwhich the returns are frequent and near. Its effect has conse-quently been to turn a part of the capital of Great Britain from an employment in which it would have maintained agreater quantity of manufacturing industry, to one in whichit maintains a much smaller, and thereby to diminish, insteadof increasing, the whole quantity of manufacturing industrymaintained in Great Britain .

The monopoly of the colony trade, therefore, like all theother mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system,depresses the industry of all other countries, but chietly that ofthe colonies, without in the least increasing, buton the contrarydiminishing,thatof the country in whose favour it is established.

The monopoly hinders the capital of that country, what-' ever may at any particular time be the extent of that capital,from maintaining so great a quantity of productive labouras it would otherwise maintain, and from affording so greata revenue to the industrious inhabitants as it would other-wise atlord. But as capital can be increased only by savingstrom revenue, the monopoly, by hindering it from affordingso great a revenue as it would otherwise afford, necessarilyhinders it trom increasing so fast as it would otherwise in-crease, and consequently from maintaining a still greaterquantity of productive labour, and affording a still greaterrevenue to the industrious inhabitants of that country. OneRreat original source of revenue, therefore, the wa«es of la-

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