of men £2,000,000
Besides what is remitted home, those servants of the company expend immense sums in the country, living there in the greatest luxury. [end of page #198]
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have been the cradle and the grave of most of those nations that have become rich and powerful by the means of commerce.
Our West India wealth, though derived from a source still more, or at least equally, impure, and though not inferior in amount, is, for several reasons, not the cause of so much envy. It is not confined to a company, and therefore the splendour and ostentation that, in the case of the Asiatic trade, occasion envy, do not exist in that to the American islands.
Our monopoly is by no means so complete, which has a double effect in our favour; for, besides preventing others from envying us so much, it prevents them from condemning us so severely.
The same nations that see, in its full force, the injustice of subjecting the inhabitants of the East, in their own country, in a way that, at the worst, is not very rigorous, join cordially in robbing Africa of its inhabitants, to make them slaves in America, in a way, that, at the best, is very rigorous.
Such are the baneful effects of sordid interest acting on the mind of man! But our business is not here to investigate opinions, but their result; and, in the present instance, we find that to admit participation in criminality is the only way to avoid envy and offence.
The third cause for envy is likewise wanting. The commerce with the West Indies is but of a recent date, and no nation has ever owed its greatness or decline to that single source. {161} It is not like the Asiatic trade, a sort of hereditary cause of quarrel; a species of heirloom, entailing upon the possessor the envy and enmity of all other nations.
The envy occasioned by the West India trade is farther diminished by the circumstance that the plantations have been raised with the money of the persons by whom they are possessed; and that if they had no original right to the soil in its barren state, the cultivation at least is owing to their capital and industry.