OF THE BALANCE OF TRADE.

of the labour and commodities which is in each province? Did not long experience make people easy on this head, what a fund of gloomy reflections might calculations afford a melancholy Yorkshireman while he computed and magnified the sums drawn to London by taxes, absentees, commodities, and found on comparison the opposite articles so much inferior? And no doubt, had the Heptarchy subsisted in England, the legislature of each state had been continually alarmed by the fear of a wrong balance; and it is probable that the mutual hatred of these states would have been extremely violent on account of their close neighbourhood; they would have loaded and oppressed all commerce by a jealous and superfluous caution. Since the Union has removed the barriers between Scotland and England, which of these nations gains from the other by this free commerce? Or if {p56} the former kingdom has received any increase of riches, can it be reasonably accounted for by anything but the increase of its art and industry? It was a common apprehension in England before the Union, as we learn from L’Abbe du Bos, that Scotland would soon drain them of their treasure were an open trade allowed; and on the other side of the Tweed a contrary apprehension prevailed—with what justice in both time has shown.