THE WEALTH OK NATIONS.

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tions. The home-consumer is obliged to pay, first, the taxwhich is necessary for paying the bounty; and secondly,the still greater tax which necessarily arises from the en-hancement of the price of the commodity in the homemarket.

By the famous treaty of commerce with Portugal , the con-sumer is prevented by high duties from purchasing of aneighbouring country, a commodity which our own climatedoes not produce, but is obliged to purchase it of a distantcountry, though it is acknowledged, that the commodity ofthe distant country is of a worse quality than that of thenear one. The home-consumer is obliged to submit to thisinconvenience, in order that the producer may import intothe distant country some of his productions upon more ad-vantageous terms than he would otherwise have been allowedto do. The consumer, too, is obliged to pay whatever en-hancement in the price of those very productions, this forcedexportation may occasion in the home market.

But in the system of laws which has been established forthe management of our American and West Indian colonies,the interest of the home-consumer has been sacrificed to thatof the producer with a move extravagant profusion than inall our other commercial regulations. A great empire hasbeen established for the sole purpose of raising up a nationot customers who should be obliged to buy from the shopsof our different producers, all the goods with which thesecould supply them. For the sake of that little enhancementof price which this monopoly might afford our producers,the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole ex-pense ot maintaining and defending that empire. For thispurpose, and for this purpose only, in the two last wars,more than two hundred millions have been spent, and a newdebt of more than a hundred and seventy millions lias beencontracted over and above all that had been expended forthe same purpose in former wars. The interest of this debtalone is not only greater than the whole extraordinary profit,which, it ever could be pretended, was made by the mono-poly of the colony trade, but than the whole value ot thattrade, or than the whole value of the goods, which at an aver-age have been annually exported to the colonies.

It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been thecontrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the con-tainers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely