An inland country, naturally fertile and easily cultivated, produces a great surplus of provisions beyond what is necessary for maintaining the cultivators, and on account of the expense of land carriage, and inconveniency of river navigation, it may frequently be difficult to send this surplus abroad.Abundance, therefore, renders provisions cheap, and encourages a great number of workmen to settle in the neighbourhood, who find that their industry can there procure them more of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than in other places.They work up the materials of manufacture which the land produces, and exchange their finished work, or what is the same thing the price of it, for more materials and provisions.They give a new value to the surplus part of the rude produce by saving the expense of carrying it to the water side or to some distant market; and they furnish the cultivators with something in exchange for it that is either useful or agreeable to them upon easier terms than they could have obtained it before.The cultivators get a better price for their surplus produce, and can purchase cheaper other conveniences which they have occasion for.They are thus both encouraged and enabled to increase this surplus produce by a further improvement and better cultivation of the land; and as the fertility of the land had given birth to the manufacture, so the progress of the manufacture reacts upon the land and increases still further its fertility.The manufacturers first supply the neighbourhood, and afterwards, as their work improves and refines, more distant markets.For though neither the rude produce nor even the coarse manufacture could, without the greatest difficulty, support the expense of a considerable land carriage, the refined and improved manufacture easily may.In a small bulk it frequently contains the price of a great quantity of rude produce.A piece of fine cloth, for example, which weighs only eighty pounds, contains in it, the price, not only of eighty pounds' weight of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the maintenance of the different working people and of their immediate employers.The corn, which could with difficulty have been carried abroad in its own shape, is in this manner virtually exported in that of the complete manufacture, and may easily be sent to the remotest corners of the world.In this manner have grown up naturally, and as it were of their own accord, the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton.Such manufactures are the offspring of agriculture.In the modern history of Europe, their extension and improvement have generally been posterior to those which were the offspring of foreign commerce.England was noted for the manufacture of fine cloths made of Spanish wool more than a century before any of those which now flourish in the places above mentioned were fit for foreign sale.The extension and improvement of these last could not take place but in consequence of the extension and improvement of agriculture the last and greatest effect of foreign commerce, and of the manufactures immediately introduced by it, and which I shall now proceed to explain.
CHAPTER IV
How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country THE increase and riches of commercial and manufacturing towns contributed to the improvement and cultivation of the countries to which they belonged in three different ways.
First, by affording a great and ready market for the rude produce of the country, they gave encouragement to its cultivation and further improvement.This benefit was not even confined to the countries in which they were situated, but extended more or less to all those with which they had any dealings.To all of them they afforded a market for some part either of their rude or manufactured produce, and consequently gave some encouragement to the industry and improvement of all.
Their own country, however, on account of its neighbourhood, necessarily derived the greatest benefit from this market.Its rude produce being charged with less carriage, the traders could pay the growers a better price for it, and yet afford it as cheap to the consumers as that of more distant countries.
Secondly, the wealth acquired by the inhabitants of cities was frequently employed in purchasing such lands as were to be sold, of which a great part would frequently be uncultivated.
Merchants are commonly ambitious of becoming country gentlemen, and when they do, they are generally the best of all improvers.Amerchant is accustomed to employ his money chiefly in profitable projects, whereas a mere country gentleman is accustomed to employ it chiefly in expense.The one often sees his money go from him and return to him again with a profit; the other, when once he parts with it, very seldom expects to see any more of it.
Those different habits naturally affect their temper and disposition in every sort of business.A merchant is commonly a bold, a country gentleman a timid undertaker.The one is not afraid to lay out at once a large capital upon the improvement of his land when he has a probable prospect of raising the value of it in proportion to the expense.The other, if he has any capital, which is not always the case, seldom ventures to employ it in this manner.If he improves at all, it is commonly not with a capital, but with what he can save out of his annual revenue.
Whoever has had the fortune to live in a mercantile town situated in an unimproved country must have frequently observed how much more spirited the operations of merchants were in this way than those of mere country gentlemen.The habits, besides, of order, economy, and attention, to which mercantile business naturally forms a merchant, render him much fitter to execute, with profit and success, any project of improvement.