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.

The most solid and secure portion of our trade is that which con-

—–­ {161} France was the nation that, before the revolution, gained the most by this trade; indeed, no nation has, to this date, gained so much as it did. -=-

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sists of our manufactures at home.  In those, though we excite envy, we excite no other of the hateful passions.  Emulation is natural, and admiration is unavoidable, on seeing the vast progress that arts and industry have made in this country; so that England is absolutely considered as the first country in the world for manufactures.

This cause of greatness and wealth operates in a more uniform and durable manner; though, like others, it has its bounds, yet the nature of them is not easily ascertained.

In this there are two things essential,—­the procuring a market, and the means of supplying it.  We have always yet found the means of supplying every market we have got; but we have not always been able to extend our market so much as it might have been wished.

America and Russia offer new markets, as has already been observed, but, to extend our old markets, we must either reduce the price, improve the quality, or extend the credit, and invention is the only means by which these things can be done; and there is no possibility of knowing where to set bounds to invention, aided by capital and the division of labour.  We are, however, not to forget that priority in point of time being one of the causes of a nation’s rise, and being of a nature to be destroyed in the course of years, the superiority we enjoy may leave us, as it did other nations in former times.

When a country produces the raw material, and labour is cheap, and the art established, we might suppose the superiority secure; but it is not.  The cotton trade was first established in the East Indies, where the material grows, where the labour is not a tenth of the price that it is in England, and the quality of the manufactured article is good; yet machinery and capital have transplanted it to England.  But the same machinery may give a superiority, or at least an equality, to some other country; it is, therefore, our business to persevere in encouraging invention, by the means that have hitherto been found so successful. {162}