George Lillie Craik

“ For, according to the proverb, a master at sea is a master at land; and more especially a king of England, seeing he is able, both by whole fleets and private ships of war, at all times to seize on ships sailing by the coast—the westerly winds, which blow for most part of the year on this side of the tropic, giving the English great opportunities to sail out of their numerous bays and harbours at pleasure to infest our navigation. ”

“ The fundamental principle of the manufacturing system was, that a trade was profitable to the public whenever, by means of any restrictions or exclusive privileges, it could be made gainful to the capitalists by whom it was carried on, and their equally protected allies, the raisers and manufacturers of the merchandise the export of which it encouraged. The interest of the purchasers and consumers of the commodities brought home by the trade, that is, of the great body of the community, this theory entirely overlooked, or at any rate treated as a matter of very secondary importance. ”

“ On the other hand, if the English had had money wherewith to make their purchases from the Turks, it is unquestionable that they would have found that the most profitable way of dealing. Whatever the theorists of the mercantile system may say, the last thing, we may be sure, that any nation will really keep at home when it has an opportunity of sending it abroad is its gold and silver. Money is at once the most effective and economical instrument of exchange, and the most useless of all things when not so employed. ”

“ But to the public at large it is really a matter of perfect indifference whether these merchants, ship-owners, and bankers or other capitalists, be natives or foreigners. Not so, however, thought our ancestors in the infancy of our foreign commerce. The commerce itself was sufficiently acceptable; but the foreigners, by whose aid it was necessary in part carried on, were the objects of a most intense and restless jealousy. Whatever portion of the profits of the commerce fell to their share was looked upon as nothing better than so much plunder. ”

“ The company of late, indeed, had been only an annoyance and a source of strife: to the last the Hanse merchants, on the one hand, continued to clamour importunately for the renewal of their ancient privileges, while the Merchant Adventurers, on the other, were as incessantly exclaiming against the unfairness of any association of foreign traders being suffered to reside in the kingdom, and to interfere with its commerce at all. The time was certainly now come in which native capital and enterprise were quite vigorous enough to dispense with any foreign aid. ”

“ The sum of the doctrine of the writers of the work on the subject of foreign commerce is given in the following words:—"That trade which makes money flow in most plentifully upon us, enables our people to subsist themselves better by their labour, raises the value of our lands, and occasions our rent to be better paid, must always be reckoned the best trade; for these are the only rules by which it is possible to state and determine the value of any particular trade, or of the general trade of the whole nation." ”

“ They were, notwithstanding this calamity, a constant mart for the product and manufactures of the country. But, if such a law as I have mentioned had passed, France would have gone on from that moment to exhaust the treasures of the kingdom. We should have presently lost our best markets both at home and abroad, our gentlemen must have felt a sudden and universal decay of their rents, and our common people must have either starved for want of work, come to the lands or the parish for subsistence, or have retired to foreign parts for bread. ”

“ The balance of trade, then, was what is commonly called in favour of England, unreasonably enough, as if nothing were wealth but gold and silver. The country at this time did not really become richer by exchanging its produce for money, than it would have done by taking foreign produce or manufactures in exchange for it. Nor, even if we should hold money to be the only true wealth, could it have accumulated in the country with more rapidity or to a greater amount under the one system than under the other ”

“ Flanders is an opulent province, the ports of which are frequented by merchants of our own sea (the Mediterranean) and the ocean. Britain (or rather England) is full of towns and villages. It has no vines, and but little fruit, but it abounds in corn, honey, and wool from which the natives make great quantities of cloth. London, the capital, may be preferred to every city of the West for population, opulence, and luxury. It is seated on the river Thames, which, by the advantage of the tide, daily receives and despatches trading vessels from and to various countries. ”

“ Thus, on the stoppage of the direct trade with the Netherlands, in 1493, it is recorded that great quantities of Flemish manufactures were still imported into England by the merchants of the Steelyard from their own Hanse towns; and that this activity of the foreigners, in a trade from which they were themselves excluded, so enraged the native merchants that they incited the London journeymen and apprentices to rise in a tumult, in which they attacked and rifled the warehouses of the obnoxious Germans. ”

“ The new path of enterprise, accordingly, immediately attracted to itself all the disposable courage, activity, and resources of the North. It was not left to the sea-kings alone; the most potent of those of the land joined the great national movement, which promised to add new realms to those they already possessed, or to enable them to exchange their niggardly ancestral islets and strips of sea-coast for broader domains in a sunnier clime. ”

“ The short space of time comprehended in the reign of Henry VII. of England is memorable for the two greatest events in the history of nautical discovery and of modern commerce,—the achievement of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and the revelation of the new world of America by the voyage of Columbus. Both these great discoveries were made in the search after the same object, a route to India by sea, which serves in some degree to account for the two having been so nearly coincident in point of time. ”

“ It is true the interest of money is risen; but that has plainly proceeded from the advantage men have found by dealing with the exchequer. It is to be feared our stock of shipping for trade is less at present than before: however, our fleet and naval strength is apparently more powerful now than ever it was; and undoubtedly this war has bred us more able seamen than formerly we had. But the truest sign of our vitals not being tainted, and that we are not wounded in any noble part, is, that our manufactures and all our home produce, generally speaking, hold up to their former rates. ”

“ The small beginnings, hidden in the depths of ancient time, of that which has become so mighty a thing as British commerce, have an interest for the imagination, the same in kind with that belonging to the discovery of the remote spring or rill which forms the apparently insignificant source of some famous river, but as much higher in degree as the history of human affairs is a higher study than the history of inanimate nature.
The Phoenicians, the great trading people of antiquity, are the first foreigners who are recorded to have opened any commercial intercourse with the British islands. ”

“ Here, then, the consolation was, that, if we were no gainers, our enemies at any rate were losers—that France was almost entirely deprived of a most profitable manufacture, which she was never likely to recover.
On the whole, however, the war, wasting capital on the one hand, and impeding its accumulation on the other,—augmenting the public burdens, and generally diminishing private gains,—could not fail, ere long, seriously to affect our economical prosperity ”

“ The fact, often exemplified, of the rapidity with which a country recovers from the obstruction and waste of war, as if the spirit of enterprise started forth on the return of peace like a spring from which a heavy pressure had been removed, and the very vacuum to be filled up occasioned a sudden rush of activity and consequent gain into the re-opened channels of industry and commerce, verified Davenant's hopes and prognostications. ”

“ Any private adventurer who chose to fit out a ship for India was connived at by the government in violating their privileges, so that the company, as a body, carried on what little trade they did merely for the sake of preventing their charter from being abrogated on the pretext that they made no use of it, and in the hope of better times. ”

“ He admits that people complained, notwithstanding, very greatly of the scarcity of money; but "this humour of complaining," he replies with much truth, "proceeds from the frailty of our natures; it being natural for men to complain of the present, and to commend the times past." "And I can say, with truth," he adds, "upon my own memory, that men did complain as much of the scarcity of money ever since I knew the world as they do now:—nay, the very same persons who now complain of this and commend that time." ”

“ The real price, or exchangeable value, of a commodity, depending as it does upon a variety of circumstances which are constantly in a state of fluctuation, is essentially a variable quantity, and we can no more fix it by a law than we can fix the wind. A law, therefore, attempting to fix it would only do injustice and mischief; it would, in so far as it was operative, merely substitute a false and unfair price of commodities for their natural and proper price. ”

“ In some cases what people got for their money scarcely professed to be anything else than simply a receipt for it—which, nevertheless, the purchaser was to try to pass off' at a higher price upon somebody else; as if it were to be attempted to circulate a description of bank-notes without either signature or promise of payment, on the mere chance of each successive receiver finding some other more sanguine or venturous than himself to take the worthless paper off his hands on a similar calculation. ”

“ I must confess England breeds in its own womb the principal supporters of its present splendour, and nourisheth with its own milk the commodities that give both lustre and life to the continuance of this trade, which I pray may neither ever decay, nor yet have the least diminution. But England being naturally seated in another corner of the world, and herein bending under the weight of too ponderous a burden, cannot possibly always and for ever find a vent for all those commodities that are seen to be daily imported and brought within the compass of so narrow a circuit ”

“ The great mass of the people were in all countries sunk in ignorance and in poverty; their able condition hardly permitted them to aspire after the enjoyment of anything beyond the absolute necessaries of existence; they were untaught in those arts and processes of industry by which commerce is fed; there had been little or no accumulation of capital, without which there can be no extensive commerce, nor any other species of undertaking that looks much beyond the passing day. ”

“ Nor is there any cause to apprehend but that we may increase from time to time in the general manufacture of wool, though the exportation of particular commodities may now and then vary; for, upon the whole, our material is better and fitter for all uses than that of most countries. It were better, indeed, that the call from abroad were only for the fine draperies, because then we should be in a manner without a rival; no country but England and Ireland having a sward or turf that will rear sheep producing the wool of which most of our draperies are made. ”

“ It was not till the reign of Alfred, towards the end of the ninth century, that the Saxons of England appear ever to have thought of building a ship, at least for war; and it may be doubted if before that time they had even any trading vessels of their own. Ever since their settlement in Britain they seem to have wholly abandoned the sea to their kindred who remained in their native seats in the north of Germany and around the Baltic,—the Northmen or Danes, by whom they were destined to be succeeded in their career of rapine and conquest. ”

“ The economical evil of a large diversion of the public wealth into the hands of the government is not that the money so paid over is absorbed or lost to the public, as if it were buried in the ground or thrown into the sea ”

“ As for the prevalent notion which Davenant takes so much pains to combat, that this trade with Holland must needs be a profitable one, simply because our exports so much exceeded our imports, it was as irrational as it would be to maintain that the productive labourer must always be a greater gainer upon the article he produces than the capitalist who employs him. The Dutch here stood in the position of the capitalist, and the English of the labourer. The former, in fact, employed the latter to work for them—to produce the goods which they sold at a profit to other countries. ”