The inhabitants of the wine countries are in general the soberest people in Europe; witness the Spainards, the Italians, and the inhabitants of the southern provinces of France.People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare.Nobody affects the character of liberality and good fellowship by being profuse of a liquor which is as cheap as small beer.On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice, as among the northern nations, and all those who live between the tropics, the negroes, for example, on the coast of Guinea.When a French regiment comes from some of the northern provinces of France, where wine is somewhat dear, to be quartered in the southern, where it is very cheap, the soldiers, I have frequently heard it observed are at first debauched by the cheapness and novelty of good wine; but after a few months' residence, the greater part of them become as sober as the rest of the inhabitants.Were the duties upon foreign wines, and the excises upon malt, beer, and ale to be taken away all at once, it might, in the same manner, occasion in Great Britain a pretty general and temporary drunkenness among the middling and inferior ranks of people, which would probably be soon followed by a permanent and almost universal sobriety.At present drunkenness is by no means the vice of people of fashion, or of those who can easily afford the most expensive liquors.Agentleman drunk with ale has scarce ever been seen among us.The restraints upon the wine trade in Great Britain, besides, do not so much seem calculated to hinder the people from going, if I may say so, to the alehouse, as from going where they can buy the best and cheapest liquor.They favour the wine trade of Portugal, and discourage that of France.The Portugese, it is said, indeed, are better customers for our manufactures than the French, and should therefore be encouraged in preference to them.As they give us their custom, it is pretended, we should give them ours.
The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire: for it is the most underling tradesmen only who make it a rule to employ chiefly their own customers.A great trader purchases his goods always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind.
By such maxims as these, however, nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours.
Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss.Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity.The capricious ambition of kings and ministers has not, during the present and the preceding century, been more fatal to the repose of Europe than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers.The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy.But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody but themselves.
That it was the spirit of monopoly which originally both invented and propagated this doctrine cannot be doubted; and they who first taught it were by no means such fools as they who believed it.In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it;nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind.Their interest is, in this respect, directly opposite to that of the great body of the people.As it is the interest of the freemen of a corporation to hinder the rest of the inhabitants from employing any workmen but themselves, so it is the interest of the merchants and manufacturers of every country to secure to themselves the monopoly of the home market.Hence in Great Britain, and in most other European countries, the extraordinary duties upon almost all goods imported by alien merchants.Hence the high duties and prohibitions upon all those foreign manufactures which can come into competition with our own.Hence, too, the extraordinary restraints upon the importation of almost all sorts of goods from those countries with which the balance of trade is supposed to be disadvantageous; that is, from those against whom national animosity happens to be most violently inflamed.