Let us now suppose the trade of England exhibiting to its foreign correspondents, in the year 1762, this total in exports of 13 millions (at the old prices) under the name of 14 millions 300 thousand pounds, (a price rendered unavoidable by the advance in the prices of all commodities, on account of the taxes); and let us suppose these correspondents to have, really and annually, no more to pay them than 13 millions of their own manufactures, indicated by this modest number, because they had not the honour to support, during seven years, a war the most brilliant and successful in the memory of man, in Germany, America, and India. I think one of the three following consequences must be the result:
Either
That the total of English exports must have been reduced from 14 millions 300 thousand pounds to 13 millions, for want of means in our foreign buyers to pay the whole amount of English exports at their advanced price:
Or,
That England must have been complaisant enough to call 13 millions, in a foreign market, the amount of her exports, which the effects of her new taxes obliged her to call 14 millions 300 thousand pounds at home:
Or,
That England must have allowed her foreign connexions to call 14 millions 300 thousand pounds the same quantity and quality of their manufactures, which, before the effect of English taxation, they called only 13 millions, and which, till then, had made the balance of what they imported from England.
In the first case, the English manufactories, which furnish the exports, would have been necessarily reduced one tenth; upon which it is necessary to observe, that the tenth of the English exportation makes a fiftieth of the total value of the product of her industry, and that the inutility of the fiftieth of those products, occasioned by the impossibility of their being purchased by foreigners at the price occasioned by the English new taxes, must have deprived of subsistence, as well as of employment, a fiftieth of the English artisans, and rendered useless a fiftieth of the capitals appropriated to exportation.
In the second case, the prices of commodities would not be perceptibly increased any where else but in England; the prices of her correspondents would have been, ten years after the peace, almost as they were in 1754.
In the third case, the prices would have increased, among the foreign correspondents of the English, nearly in the same proportion as in England.