Book III: Chapter 1

BOOK III.

OF THE DIFFERENT PROGRESS OF OPULENCE IN DIFFERENT NATIONS

CHAPTER I.

OF THE NATURAL PROGRESS OF OPULENCE.

The great commerce of every civilized society is that carried on between the
inhabitants of the town and those of the country. It consists in the
exchange of rude for manufactured produce, either immediately, or by the
intervention of money, or of some sort of paper which represents money. The
country supplies the town with the means of subsistence and the materials of
manufacture. The town repays this supply, by sending back a part of the
manufactured produce to the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which
there neither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, may very
properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country.
We must not, however, upon this account, imagine that the gain of the town
is the loss of the country. The gains of both are mutual and reciprocal, and
the division of labour is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous to all
the different persons employed in the various occupations into which it is
subdivided. The inhabitants of the country purchase of the town a greater
quantity of manufactured goods with the produce of a much smaller quantity
of their own labour, than they must have employed had they attempted to
prepare them themselves. The town affords a market for the surplus produce
of the country, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators
; and it is there that the inhabitants of the country exchange it for
something else which is in demand among them. The greater the number and
revenue of the inhabitants of the town, the more extensive is the market
which it affords to those of the country ; and the more extensive that
market, it is always the more advantageous to a great number. The corn which
grows within a mile of the town, sells there for the same price with that
which comes from twenty miles distance. But the price of the latter must,
generally, not only pay the expense of raising it and bringing it to market,
but afford, too, the ordinary profits of agriculture to the farmer. The
proprietors and cultivators of the country, therefore, which lies in the
neighbourhood of the town, over and above the ordinary profits of
agriculture, gain, in the price of what they sell, the whole value of the
carriage of the like produce that is brought from more distant parts ; and
they save, besides, the whole value of this carriage in the price of what
they buy. Compare the cultivation of the lands in the neighbourhood of any
considerable town, with that of those which lie at some distance from it,
and you will easily satisfy yourself bow much the country is benefited by
the commerce of the town. Among all the