What would be the result?  Why, that one country would become wholly, or in great part, agricultural, and the other wholly, or in great part, manufacturing.  Is this a result desirable to either?  Admitting that a city or small state, which has no territory which can furnish any considerable proportion of the subsistence which it requires, like Holland, may do well to attend exclusively to manufactures and commerce; or a country which, by the rigour of nature, or the remoteness of its situation, cannot attain to commercial or manufacturing greatness, would do well to attend exclusively to the cultivation or productions of the earth; the question which here occurs—­Is such a system advisable or expedient for a nation which has received from the bounty of nature the means of rising to greatness in both—­such as Great Britain, Russia, or Prussia?  The free traders would have England sacrifice its agriculture to its manufactures, and Russia sacrifice its manufactures to its agriculture.  Would such a system benefit either?  Would England be happier or richer, more stable or more moral, if the already colossal amount of its manufactures were trebled; or Russia, if its rising iron and woolen fabrics were destroyed, and its industry confined exclusively to the slow return of agricultural labour?  Is it desirable that the zone of tall chimneys, sickly faces, brick houses, and crowded jails, which at present spans across the whole of England and part of Scotland, should be doubled and trebled in breadth; and the fertile fields of Kent, Norfolk, and East Lothian, be reduced to vast unenclosed pastures, such as overspread Italy in the later stages of the Roman empire?  Or is it desirable to Russia and Prussia that they should be for ever chained to the labour of boors, serfs, and shepherds, and all the vivifying and unimportant effects of commercial wealth be denied to their exertions?  Nature has designed, experience recommends, a very different system.  History tells us in all parts of the world, that it is in the intermixture of commerce and agriculture that the best security is to be found for social happiness and advancement, and the most effectual antidote provided to the evils with which either, when existing alone, is so prone.  Mr McCulloch has told us, that the commerce and manufactures of Great Britain have now risen to such a prodigious height, that any further extension of them is undesirable, and that no real patriot would have desired them to have become so extensive as they already are.  Is it desirable, in such a state of matters, to go on increasing the same splendid but perilous system, and to do so at the expense of the great pillar of national wealth, security, and independence—­the land of the state?

Further, the proposed system is pernicious even with reference to the national wealth and interests of the manufacturers themselves, as tending to undermine the main branches of our national resources, and substitute encouragement to an inferior, to upholding of the superior market for our manufacturing industry.