CHAPTER XXIII.

According to Adam Smith the colony trade, by being one in which British capital only can be employed, has raised the rate of profits of all other trades; and as in his opinion high profits, as well as high wages, raise the prices of commodities, the monopoly of the colony trade has been, according to him, injurious to the mother country; as it has diminished her power of selling manufactured commodities as cheap as other countries. He says, that "in consequence of the monopoly, the increase of the colony trade has not so much occasioned an addition to the trade which Great Britain had before, as a total change in its direction. Secondly, this monopoly has necessarily contributed to keep up the rate of profit in all the different branches of British trade, higher than it naturally would have been, had all nations been allowed a free trade to the British colonies." "But whatever raises in any country the ordinary rate of profit higher than it otherwise would be, necessarily subjects that country both to an absolute, and to a relative disadvantage in every branch of trade of which she has