It is not by the importation of gold and silver that the discovery of America has enriched Europe.By the abundance of the American mines, those metals have become cheaper.A service of plate can now be purchased for about a third part of the corn, or a third part of the labour, which it would have cost in the fifteenth century.With the same annual expense of labour and commodities, Europe can annually purchase about three times the quantity of plate which it could have purchased at that time.But when a commodity comes to be sold for a third part of what had been its usual price, not only those who purchased it before can purchase three times their former quantity, but it is brought down to the level of a much greater number of purchasers, perhaps to more than ten, perhaps to more than twenty times the former number.So that there may be in Europe at present not only more than three times, but more than twenty or thirty times the quantity of plate which would have been in it, even in its present state of improvement, had the discovery of the American mines never been made.So far Europe has, no doubt, gained a real conveniency, though surely a very trifling one.The cheapness of gold and silver renders those metals rather less fit for the purposes of money than they were before.In order to make the same purchases, we must load ourselves with a greater quantity of them, and carry about a shilling in our pocket where a groat would have done before.It is difficult to say which is most trifling, this inconveniency or the opposite conveniency.Neither the one nor the other could have made any very essential change in the state of Europe.The discovery of America, however, certainly made a most essential one.By opening a new and inexhaustible market to all the commodities of Europe, it gave occasion to new divisions of labour and improvements of art, which in the narrow circle of the ancient commerce, could never have taken place for want of a market to take off the greater part of their produce.The productive powers of labour were improved, and its produce increased in all the different countries of Europe, and together with it the real revenue and wealth of the inhabitants.The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe.A new set of exchanges, therefore, began to take place which had never been thought of before, and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent.The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.
The discovery of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, which happened much about the same time, opened perhaps a still more extensive range to foreign commerce than even that of America, notwithstanding the greater distance.There were but two nations in America in any respect superior to savages, and these were destroyed almost as soon as discovered.