While industry is kept alive there is still ground for hope. Manners change, and the same luxury which extinguished foreign trade, by calling home the wealth employed in that species of circulation, may afterwards, by keeping industry alive at home, and by throwing a sufficient power of wealth into the hands of a good statesman, render the recovery of that trade no difficult project, to one who has an instrument in his possession, so irresistible in removing every obstacle in the way of his undertaking.
This represents a new circulation; to wit, that of the spirit and manners of a people, who, under the government of able statesmen, may prosper in every situation; and since, from the nature of man, no prosperity can be permanent, the next best thing to be done, is, to yield to the force which cannot be resisted; and, by address and management, reconduct a people to the height of their former prosperity, after having made them travel (as I may say) with as little inconvenience as possible, through all the stages of decline.
CHAP. XXVIII.
Circulation considered with regard to the rise and fall of the Price of Subsistence and Manufactures.
The intention of this chapter is to apply the principles we have been in search of, to the solution of some questions, which have been treated by those great masters of political reasoning, Messrs. de Montesquieu and Hume. The ideas they have broached are so pretty, and the theory they have laid down for determining the rise and fall of prices so simple, and so extensive, that it is no wonder to see it adopted by almost every one who has writ after them.
I have not forgot how much I was pleased when first I perused these authors, from the easy distribution which a general theory enabled me to make of certain classes of my ideas then lying without order, in that great repository of human crudities, the memory; which frequently retains more materials, than people, commonly, have either time, or perhaps capacity rightly to digest.
I am very far from pretending to any superiority of understanding over those gentlemen whose opinions I intend to review: accident alone has led me to a more minute examination of the particular circumstances, upon which they have founded their general combinations; and in consequence of my inquiries, I think I have discovered, that in this, as in every other part of the science of political oeconomy, there is hardly such a thing as a general rule to be laid down.
There is no real or adequate proportion between the value of money and of goods; and yet in every country we find one established. How is this to be accounted for?
We have, in the fourth chapter of this book, already inquired into the principles which point out the influence of trade upon the variation of the price of goods; but the question now comes to be, how to fix and determine the fundamental price, which is the object of variation. It has been said, that the price of a manufacture is to be known by the expence of living of the workman, the sum it costs him to bring his work to perfection, and his reasonable profit. We are now to examine what it is, which in all countries must determine the standard prices of these articles of the first necessity; since the value of them does necessarily influence that of all others.
The best way to come at truth, in all questions of this nature, is, to simplify them as much as possible, that they may be first clearly understood.