those inequalities. The capital belonging to a country will, to a great extent, remain in the country, even if there be no mode of employing it in which it would not be more productive elsewhere. Yet even a country thus circumstanced might, and probably would, carry on trade with [pg 379] other countries. It would export articles of some sort, even to places which could make them with less labor than itself; because those countries, supposing them to have an advantage over it in all productions, would have a greater advantage in some things than in others, and would find it their interest to import the articles in which their advantage was smallest, that they might employ more of their labor and capital on those in which it was greatest.
§ 2. Interchange of commodities between distance places determined by differences not in their absolute, but in the comparative, costs of production.
As I have said elsewhere260 after Ricardo (the thinker who has done most toward clearing up this subject),261 “it is not a difference in the absolute cost of production which determines the interchange, but a