trade while diminishing the power to maintain trade. "Whatever tends,"
says he, "to diminish in any country the number of artificers and
manufacturers, tends to diminish the home market, the most important
of all markets, for the rude produce of the land, and thereby still
further to discourage agriculture," and consequently to diminish the
power of producing things with which to trade. He nowhere refers to
the fact that any system which looks to compelling a nation to export
raw produce, tends necessarily to the impoverishment of the land and
its owner, and to the diminution, of the freedom of the labourer, and
yet that such was the case could scarcely have escaped his
observation. The tendency of the then existing English policy was, as
he showed, to produce in various countries a necessity for exporting
every thing in its rudest form, thus increasing the cost of
transportation, while impoverishing the land and exhausting the
people. The legislature had been, he said, "prevailed upon" to prevent
the establishment of manufactures in the colonies, "sometimes by high
duties, and sometimes by absolute prohibitions." In Grenada, while a
colony of France, every plantation had its own refinery of sugar, but
on its cession to England they were all abandoned, and thus was the
number of artisans diminished, to "the discouragement of agriculture."
The course of proceeding relative to these colonies is thus
described:--

"While Great Britain encourages in America the manufacturing of pig
and bar iron, by exempting them from duties to which the like
commodities are subject when imported from any other country, she
imposes an absolute prohibition upon the erection of steel furnaces
and slit-mills in any of her American plantations: She will not
suffer her colonies to work in those more refined manufactures, even
for their own consumption; but insists upon their purchasing of her