Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark, often to be met with in historians, and even in common conversation, that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money. It appears that the want of money can never injure any state within itself: for men and commodities are the real strength of any community. It is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silver to few hands and preventing its universal diffusion and circulation. On the contrary, industry and refinements of all kinds incorporate it with the whole state, however small its quantity may be; they digest it into every vein, so to speak, and make it enter into every transaction and contract. No hand is entirely empty of it. And as the prices of everything fall by that means, the sovereign has a double advantage: he may draw money by his taxes from every part of the state, and what he receives goes farther in every purchase and payment.
We may infer, from a comparison of prices, that money is not more plentiful in China than it was in Europe three centuries ago; but what immense power is that empire possessed of, if we may judge by the civil and military list maintained by it! Polybius tells us that provisions were so {p39} cheap in Italy during his time that in some places the stated club16 at the inns was a semis a head, little more than a farthing! Yet the Roman power had even then subdued the whole known world. About a century before that period the Carthaginian ambassador said, by way of raillery, that no people lived more sociably amongst themselves than the Romans, for that in every entertainment which, as foreign ministers, they received they still observed the same plate at every table. The absolute quantity of the precious metals is a matter of great indifference. There are only two circumstances of any importance—viz., their gradual increase and their thorough concoction and circulation through the state; and the influence of both these circumstances has been here explained.