It is more, therefore, through the taste of superfluity, than in consequence of the quantity of coin, that trade comes to be established; and it is only in consequence of trade that we see industry carry things in our days to so high a pitch of refinement and delicacy. Let me illustrate this by comparing together the different operations of barter, sale, and commerce.
When reciprocal wants are supplied by barter, there is not the smallest occasion for money: this is the most simple of all combinations.
When wants are multiplied, bartering becomes (for obvious reasons) more difficult; upon this money is introduced. This is the common price of all things: it is a proper equivalent in the hands of those who want, perfectly calculated to supply the occasions of those who, by industry, can relieve them. This operation of buying and selling is a little more complex than the former; but still we have here no idea of trade, because we have not introduced the merchant, by whose industry it is carried on.
Let this third person be brought into play, and the whole operation becomes clear. What before we called wants, is here represented by the consumer; what we called industry, by the manufacturer; what we called money, by the merchant. The merchant here represents the money, by substituting credit in its place; and as the money was invented to facilitate barter, so the merchant, with his credit, is a new refinement upon the use of money. This renders it still more effectual in performing the operations of buying and selling. This operation is trade: it relieves both parties of the whole trouble of transportation, and adjusting wants to wants, or wants to money; the merchant represents by turns both the consumer, the manufacturer, and the money. To the consumer he appears as the whole body of manufacturers; to the manufacturers as the whole body of consumers; and to the one and the other class his credit supplies the use of money. This is sufficient at present for an illustration. I must now return to the simple operations of money in the hands of the two contracting parties, the buyer and the seller, in order to show how men come to submit to labour in order to acquire superfluities.
So soon as money is introduced into a country it becomes, as we have said above, an universal object of want to all the inhabitants. The consequence is, that the free hands of the state, who before stopt working, because all their wants were provided for, having this new object of ambition before their eyes, endeavour, by refinements upon their labour, to remove the smaller inconveniencies which result from a simplicity of manners. People, I shall suppose, who formerly knew but one sort of cloathing for all seasons, willingly part with a little money to procure for themselves different sorts of apparel properly adapted to summer and winter, which the ingenuity of manufacturers, and their desire of getting money, may have suggested to their invention.
I shall not here pursue the gradual progress of industry, in bringing manufactures to perfection; nor interrupt my subject with any further observations upon the advantages resulting to industry, from the establishment of civil and domestic liberty, but shall only suggest, that these refinements seem more generally owing to the industry and invention of the manufacturers (who by their ingenuity daily contrive means of softening or relieving inconveniencies, which mankind seldom perceive to be such, till the way of removing them is contrived) than to the taste for luxury in the rich, who, to indulge their ease, engage the poor to become industrious.
Let any man make an experiment of this nature upon himself, by entring into the first shop. He will no where so quickly discover his wants as there. Every thing he sees appears either necessary, or at least highly convenient; and he begins to wonder (especially if he be rich) how he could have been so long without that which the ingenuity of the workman alone had invented, in order that from the novelty it might excite his desire; for perhaps when it is bought, he will never once think of it more, nor ever apply it to the use for which it at first appeared so necessary.
Here then is a reason why mankind labour though not in want. They become desirous of possessing the very instruments of luxury, which their avarice or ambition prompted them to invent for the use of others.
What has been said represents trade in its infancy, or rather the materials with which that great fabric is built.
We have formed an idea of the wants of mankind multiplied even to luxury, and abundantly supplied by the employment of all the free hands set apart for that purpose. But if we suppose the workman himself disposing of his work, and purchasing, with it, food from the farmer, cloaths from the clothier, and in general seeking for the supply of every want from the hands of the person directly employed for the purpose of relieving it; this will not convey an idea of trade, according to our definition.