第14章

Adam Smith himself admits, that a country may come to be fully stocked in proportion to all the business it has to transact, and have as great a quantity of stock employed, in every particular branch, as the nature and extent of the territory will admit.He speaks of Holland also, as a country which had then nearly acquired its full compliment of riches; where, in every particular branch of business, there was the greatest quantity of stock that could be employed in it.(14) It would then appear that, even according to him, the principle of individual accumulation, as a means of advancing the national capital, has limits beyond which it cannot pass.The same cannot be said of that increase which is derived from the attainment of those objects at which the inventive faculty aims.Had Holland, sixty years ago, been put in possession of the astonishing improvements in mechanical and manufacturing industry, which, since that period, have sprung up in Great Britain, who can suppose that she would have wanted ability to continue in the successful pursuit of wealth; or, that she would not have started forward with fresh vigor in the career, and advanced in it with greater rapidity than in any former period of her history? There is no avoiding the admission, that, to every great advance which nations make in the acquisition of wealth, it is necessary that invention leading to improvement should lend its aid; and, granting this, it necessarily follows, as when one cause is discovered sufficient to account for the phenomena, we should confine ourselves to it, that we are not warranted to assume that they make even the smallest sensible progress without the aid of the same faculty.

To this general observation there are only two apparent exceptions.

The progress of commerce by the increase of some particular branch of it, or by the opening of fresh branches; and the settlement of new countries.

If these, however, should be esteemed exceptions to the observation with regard to any particular nation or nations, they are extensions of it with regard to all the nations of the earth; implying that the increase of general wealth is connected with the general spread of invention, or inventions, over the world.

The principle, therefore, of the identity of the interests of nations and individuals is by no means a self-evident principle.The identity of their interests can only follow from the identity of the ends which they pursue; but these ends being, as far as we can see, identical only in name, and in reality not identical, the presumption rather is, that the means also by which they are arrived at are not identical.

It seems to me, that it requires very little pausing upon the examination of this principle to perceive its inconclusiveness as an argument.It is a principle, nevertheless, which, like other popular doctrines founded merely on the ambiguity of a word, has been very much insisted on, and meets one in all variety of shapes.On this account, the reader may perhaps excuse me, for detaining him a little longer on the consideration of it, by bringing before him a passage from our author, which may serve to expose its unsoundness, by showing how easily it may be made to lead to the most obvious fallacies."The annual produce of the land and labor of England is certainly much greater than it was more than a century ago at the restoration of Charles II.It was certainly much greater at the restoration than we can suppose it to have been about a hundred years before, at the accession of Elizabeth.At this period, too, we have reason to believe, the country was much more advanced in improvement than it had been about a century before, towards the close of the dissensions between the houses of York and Lancaster.Even then it was probably in a better condition than it had been at the Norman Conquest; and at the Norman Conquest, than during the confusion of the Saxon Heptarchy.Even at this early period it was certainly a more improved country than at the invasion of Julius Caesar, when its inhabitants were nearly in the same state with the savages in North America.