regard to the balance of trade, and a fear that all their gold and silver may be leaving them. This seems to me, almost in every case, a very groundless apprehension, and I should as soon {p52} dread that all our springs and rivers should be exhausted as that money should abandon a kingdom where there are people and industry. Let us carefully preserve these latter advantages, and we need never be apprehensive of losing the former.
It is easy to observe that all calculations concerning the balance of trade are founded on very uncertain facts and suppositions. The custom-house books are allowed to be an insufficient ground of reasoning; nor is the rate of exchange much better, unless we consider it with all nations, and know also the proportion of the several sums remitted, which one may safely pronounce impossible. Every man who has ever reasoned on this subject has always proved his theory, whatever it was, by facts and calculations, and by an enumeration of all the commodities sent to all foreign kingdoms.
The writings of Mr. Gee struck the nation with a universal panic when they saw it plainly demonstrated by a detail of particulars that the balance was against them for so considerable a sum as must leave them without a single shilling in five or six years. But luckily twenty years have since elapsed, with an expensive foreign war, and yet it is commonly supposed that money is still more plentiful among us than in any former period.
Nothing can be more entertaining on this head than Dr. Swift, an author so quick in discerning the mistakes and absurdities of others. He says, in his Short View of the State of Ireland, that the whole cash of that kingdom amounted but to £500,000; that out of this they remitted every year a neat million to England, and had scarce any other source from which they could compensate themselves, and little other foreign trade but the importation of French wines, for which they paid ready money. The