any two countries must necessarily be advantageous to both. The very intention of commerce is to exchange your own commodities for others which you think will be more convenient for you. When two men trade between themselves it is undoubtedly for the advantage of both. … The case is exactly the same betwixt any two nations. The goods which the English merchants want to import from France are certainly more valuable to them than what they give for them.”
These jealousies and prohibitions were most hurtful to the richest nations, and it would benefit France and England especially, if “all national prejudices were rooted out and a free and uninterrupted commerce established.” No nation was ever ruined by this balance of trade. All political writers since the time of Charles II had been prophesying “that in a few years we would be reduced to an absolute state of poverty,” but “we find ourselves far richer than before.”
The erroneous notion that national opulence consists in money had also given rise to the absurd opinion that “no home consumption can hurt the opulence of a country.”
It was this notion too that led to Law’s Mississippi scheme, compared to which our own South Sea scheme was a trifle.
Interest does not depend on the value of money, but on the quantity of stock. Exchange is a method of dispensing with the transmission of money.
Under the third heading, the history of commerce, or the causes of the slow progress of opulence, Adam Smith dealt with “first, natural impediments, and secondly, the oppression of civil government.” He is not recorded to have mentioned any natural impediments except the absence of division of labour in rude and barbarous times owing to the