[A2-2-6] Emphasized especially by David Hume who calls attention to the seeking of its level by water. (Discourses: On the Balance of Trade.) J. B. Say speaks of carriages, the increase of which over and above the need of them must infallibly produce a reëxportation of them. (Traité, I, ch. 17.)
[A2-2-7] With all the severity of its export prohibitions, Spain, for centuries, served as a medium to conduct the streams of American silver to the other parts of Europe. As to how Spain, during the last third of the 18th century, was overflowed by copper money, see Campomanes, Educación popular, IV, 272.
[A2-2-8] von. Schröder, F. Schatz- und Rentkammer, XXVII, has a very ingenuous faith in the rate of exchange and a tariff-record (Zollregister); while Child had a much better insight into the defects of these two criteria. (Disc. of Trade, p. 312 ff.) Compare Steuart, Principles, III, 2, ch. 2.
[A2-2-9] Compare § 199. It was a discovery of Locke's, that borrowing from foreign countries was advantageous in all those instances in which the inland borrower earned more than the amount of his interest by means of the loan. (Considerations, p. 9.)
[A2-2-10] Ségur, Mémoires, II, 298, tells how the Russian officers of custom were bribed by English merchants to represent the Russian imports from England under, and the exports to England above the true value. In addition to this, smuggling was carried on!
[A2-2-11] J. B. Say calculates from the English tariff-record (Zollregister), from the beginning of the 18th century to 1798, an excess of exports over imports of £347,000,000; and yet the highest estimates of the amount of money actually in England, according to Pitt and Price, gave only £47,000,000. (Traité, I, IV, 17.) The Russian lists of exports and imports from 1742 to 1797, show a favorable balance of 250,000,000 rubles; to which must be added 88,000,000 rubles taken from the mines during the same time. But it is notorious that the stores of money diminished. Storch, Gemälde des russischen Reiches, XI, 12.
[A2-2-12] Manuel, 310. F. B. W. Herrmann (Münch. gelehrte Anz. XXV, 540) also declares the whole theory of the balance of trade wrong. According to Brauner, Was sind Maut[TN 125] und Zollanstalten (1816), 51, it is "a mere fancy."
[A2-2-13] Recognized even by Ch. Davenant, On the probable methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (Works, II, p. 11).
SECTION III.
FURTHER REACTION AGAINST THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM.