advantage of foreign commerce consists in the imports. A country obtains things which it either could not have produced at all, or which it must have produced at a greater expense of capital and labor than the cost of the things which it exports to pay for them. It thus obtains a more ample supply of the commodities it wants, for the same labor and capital; or the same supply, for less labor and capital, leaving the surplus disposable to produce other things. The vulgar theory disregards this benefit and deems the advantage of commerce to reside in the exports: as if not what a country obtains, but what it parts with, by its foreign trade, was supposed to constitute the gain to it. An extended market for its produce—an abundant consumption for its goods—a vent for its surplus—are the phrases by which it has been customary to designate the uses and recommendations of commerce with foreign countries. This notion is intelligible, when we consider that the authors and leaders of opinion on mercantile questions have always hitherto been the selling class. It is in truth a surviving relic of the Mercantile Theory, according to which, money being the only wealth, selling, or, in other words, exchanging goods for money, was (to countries without mines of their own) the only way of growing rich—and importation of goods, that is to say, parting with money, was so much subtracted from the benefit.
The notion that money alone is wealth has been long defunct, but it has left many of its progeny behind it. Adam Smith's theory of the benefit of foreign trade was, that it afforded an outlet for the surplus produce of a country, and enabled a portion of the capital of the country to replace itself with a profit. The expression, surplus produce, seems to imply that a country is under some kind of necessity of producing the corn or cloth which it exports; so that the portion which it does not itself