instead? On the other hand, if the English had had money wherewith to make their purchases from the Turks, it is unquestionable that they would have found that the most profitable way of dealing. Whatever the theorists of the mercantile system may say, the last thing, we may be sure, that any nation will really keep at home when it has an opportunity of sending it abroad is its gold and silver. Money is at once the most effective and economical instrument of exchange, and the most useless of all things when not so employed. The mercantile system rests upon the notion that a country never can have too much money; whereas the truth is, money is almost the only thing of which more than a certain quantity permanently confined within a country would really be of no use. If a country has as much of everything else as it wants, it will always have as much money as it wants; its stock of money or representative wealth, will always be proportioned to its stock of other and more real wealth; and no mode of carrying on trade with another country, or with all other countries,—in other words, no state, favourable or unfavourable, to use the established expressions, of what is called the balance of trade—can in the least affect the matter. In fact, this same balance of trade, about which so much anxious calculation has been expended, is in every view the most purely insignificant thing in the whole world; it is of no more consequence than the balance between the numbers of the red-painted and black-painted ships that may have been employed in any particular trade, or of the light-complexioned and dark-complexioned sailors by which they may have been manned. It is evident that no country can have its general balance of trade permanently or for any long course of years either favourable or unfavourable; either supposition implies that which is impossible. The result of a permanently favourable balance, would be such a constant accumulation of the precious metals in the country as would be only burdensome if it could take place, but, at the same time, really could no more happen than a constant accumulation of water upon a particular spot in a plain. A permanently or long-continued unfa-
