of our people; and it is a mark that, though we may have been interrupted in our importations, yet that we export rather more than in former times. If we decreased in people to any degree there would be less consumption, and consequently our home commodities would have become cheaper; and, if there were not a great call abroad for our product and manufactures, they must sink in value here. Not only now, but during the whole war, they have sold well at home and abroad, which is a sign that we did not quite consume and live altogether upon the capital, but that our annual produce and income did go a great way towards maintaining our foreign expenses." The war, finally, he observes, had not been unproductive of some advantages to our domestic industry, which helped to enable us to sustain the heavy pressure it had laid upon us:—"As it hindered our trade, and was expensive to us, so it interrupted the tillage, labor, and manufactures of other countries, and created there a necessity of our commodities; to which must be attributed, in some measure, the great call that has been during nine years for our corn, barreled beef and pork, tallow, leather, cheese and butter, and coarser sort of drapery......The returns of these commodities have helped us to maintain our foreign expenses, and have kept the radical moisture within the kingdom, which otherwise must have been quite exhausted by drawing out those sums that were necessary to subsist our troops in Flanders. This exportation, occasioned by the wants which war only had brought upon our neighbours, has stood in the room of money, which else must have been exported; so that, comparing the present species with what was in the kingdom in 1688, there seems to be still more money left than we could reasonably hope to find after a war so long and so expensive. By the stock that had been gathered in peace, and by the benefit of these more than ordinary, and in some sort accidental, exportations, we have maintained ourselves for nine years; and now, at the end of the business, our condition is very far from desperate."[1]
- ↑ Discourses on the Public Revenues, &c., in Works, i. 380.
