Wealth of nations

“ Though wealth and power are often found united, they are sometimes found separated. Wealth is altogether a real possession; power is comparative. Thus, a nation may be wealthy in itself, though unconnected with any other nation; but its power can only be estimated by a comparison with that of other nations.
Wealth consists in having abundance of whatever mankind want or desire; and if there were but one nation on earth, it might be wealthy ”

“ If nations were to consider in what branches of manufacture they are best fitted to excel, it would save much rivalship, misunderstanding, and jealousy; at the same time that it would tend greatly to increase the general aggregate wealth of mankind. It is not to industry and effort alone that mankind owe wealth, but to industry and effort well directed. ”

“ It is a work by which we will repay to France and Portugal and to Sweden—to all our mother lands across the Atlantic—all the gifts of civilization, of literature, of art, of the results of their long struggles upward from barbarism to light, with which they have endowed us. For in the vast fields of incalculable wealth that the American continents offer to the enterprise and the cultivation of the world, the older nations of Europe will find their wealth, and opportunity for the exercise of their powers in peace and with equality. ”

“ Individuals, gaining money by commerce, may sometimes have the splendour and magnanimity of princes; but nations that depend only on commerce for wealth never can. No nation, while it continues great or wealthy, can rid itself of the characteristic manners that attend the way in which it obtains its wealth and greatness. Merchants owe their wealth to a strict adherence to their interest, and they cannot help shewing it. ”

“ But it has not been without displeased surprise that I have found myself totally unable, as yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to force this plain thought into my readers' heads,—that the wealth of nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers; and that the real good of all work, and of all commerce, depends on the final worth of the thing you make, or get by it. ”

“ It is the object of that system to enrich a great nation, rather by trade and manufactures than by the improvement and cultivation of land, rather by the industry of the towns than by that of the country. ”

“ There are only two ways by which wealth is accumulated and brought into few hands; the one by compulsion and levying taxes, the other by producing or procuring objects of desire; for a small quantity of which, people give up a great portion of their labour.
Sovereigns have amassed wealth and possessed revenue by the first means, and the use they have put it to has been magnificence in building, or in great or useful works, for war, or for pleasure. ”

“ In this manner it is, that the capital of a rich country supplies the want of it in poorer ones, and that, by degrees, a nation saps the foundation of its own wealth and greatness, and gives encouragement to them in others. ”

“ It was discovered a few centuries ago, that small principalities, and even single cities, acquired more wealth by industry, than all the mighty monarchs of the middle ages did by war; but we are not yet advanced to the ultimate end of the lessons that experience and reason give in regard to the interests of nations, with regard to wealth and power. ”

“ Nothing could be more agreeable to the spirit of that system than a sort of bounty upon the production of money, the very thing which, it supposes, constitutes the wealth of every nation. It is one of its many admirable expedients for enriching the country. ”

“ Produced by Colin Muir, and David Widger An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith Contents
INTRODUCTION AND PLAN OF THE WORK.
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. ”

“ In what way, therefore, has the policy of Europe contributed either to the first establishment, or to the present grandeur of the colonies of America? In one way, and in one way only, it has contributed a good deal. Magna virûm mater! It bred and formed the men who were capable of achieving such great actions, and of laying the foundation of so great an empire; and there is no other quarter of the world, of which the policy is capable of forming, or has ever actually, and in fact, formed such men. ”

“ In early ages, when knowledge was but little advanced, and when the small stock that had been accumulated was confined nearly to a single spot, the first description of causes were the principal ones. -- Local situation, priority in discovery, or in establishment, gave to one nation a superiority over others, and occasioned the accumulation of wealth, and the acquisition of power and territory. ”

“ Thus it is, that necessity acts but in a very inferior degree on the nation that is the farthest advanced; while it operates in a very powerful way on those that are in arrear; and this single reason, without the intervention of wars or any sort of contest or robbery, would, in the process of time, bring nations to a sort of equality in wealth and refinement; that is, it would bring them all into possession of the means of gratifying their wants. ”

“ The funds which maintained the foreign wars of the present century, the most expensive, perhaps, which history records, seem to have had little dependence upon the exportation either of the circulating money, or of the plate of private families, or of the treasure of the prince. ”

“ Before entering upon this Inquiry, it may be well, for the sake of being explicitly understood, to define what I mean by wealthy and powerful nations.
In speaking of nations, wealth and power are sometimes related to each other, as cause and effect. Sometimes there is between a mutual action and re-action. In the natural or ordinary course of things, they are, at first, intimately connected and dependent on each other, till, at last, this connection lessening by degrees, and they even act in opposite directions; when wealth undermines and destroys power, but power never destroys wealth. ”

“ Where wealth has been acquired first, power has generally been sought for afterwards; and, where power came first, it has always sought the readiest road to wealth, by attacking those who were in possession of it. ”

“ The course of human prosperity, indeed, seems scarce ever to have been of so long continuance as to enable any great country to acquire capital sufficient for all those three purposes; unless, perhaps, we give credit to the wonderful accounts of the wealth and cultivation of China, of those of ancient Egypt, and of the ancient state of Indostan. ”

“ Amongst the interior causes of the decline of wealthy nations, arising from the wealth itself, we must set this down as one of a very general and natural operation. We must be particularly careful to remove this, as far as possible, if we mean to avert those evils which hitherto have arisen from a superior degree of wealth and power in every nation. ”

“ A nation may import to a greater value than it exports for half a century, perhaps, together; the gold and silver which comes into it during all this time, may be all immediately sent out of it; its circulating coin may gradually decay, different sorts of paper money being substituted in its place, and even the debts, too, which it contracts in the principal nations with whom it deals, may be gradually increasing; and yet its real wealth, the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its lands and labour, may, during the same period, have been increasing in a much greater proportion. ”

“ 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 purpose is not advanced, but retarded, by such contests; and if those, who rule nations, would condescend to enter into the merits of the case, they would find, not only that the happiness of the people, and every purpose at which they aim, would be better answered than by contesting about the means of wealth, which, consisting in internal industry, does not admit of a transfer. ”

“ It has not done away the advantages that arise from superior industry and attention to business, or from the gradual introduction of knowledge amongst the more ignorant, thereby lessening their inferiority, and tending to bring nations to a level; on the contrary, by increasing the advantages, and securing the gradual triumphs gained by arts and industry, from the violence of war, it makes wealth a more desirable object, and the loss of it a greater misfortune. ”

“ The above figures require only to be glanced at, to learn the increased wealth and productions of foreign nations, in comparison with the portion which England has in the trade and value of such articles, now become absolutely necessary for the manufactures, the luxuries, and the necessaries of life amongst the civilized nations of the world. ”

“ Thus, for example, the Americans are increasing in wealth, from necessity, because their country is becoming better, by being cultivated, in order to produce what is necessary. They cannot have what they want, in the way they wish, without increasing or bettering the property of which they have taken possession. ”

“ The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit, which a nation derives from its foreign trade. ”

“ They contribute, in an eminent degree, to the public prosperity, and to the rapid advance of the nation, not only in wealth and power, but in those attributes, which command influence and respect among the nations of Europe. ”

“ A country whose industry produces a great annual surplus of such manufactures, which are usually exported to foreign countries, may carry on for many years a very expensive foreign war, without either exporting any considerable quantity of gold and silver, or even having any such quantity to export. ”

“ The sovereigns of improved and commercial countries are not under the same necessity of accumulating treasures, because they can generally draw from their subjects extraordinary aids upon extraordinary occasions. ”

“ that to attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils. ”

“ Such nations are always strangers to every sort of luxury, and great wealth can scarce ever be dissipated among them by improvident profusion. There are no nations, accordingly, who abound more in families revered and honoured on account of their descent from a long race of great and illustrious ancestors ”

“ The latter part of the same book will treat of the exterior causes of decline, arising from the envy of other nations; their advancement in the same arts to which the nations that are rich owe their wealth, or their excelling them in other arts, by which they can be rivalled, reduced, or subdued. ”

“ The nations with whose wealth and revenues we are best acquainted, are France, Great Britain, and the United Provinces. The real wealth of a nation, consisting in its labor and commodities, is to be estimated by the sign of that wealth—its circulating cash. ”

“ They saw Governments in the Old World based upon different orders of society, and so constituted as to throw the whole power of nations into the hands of a few, who taxed and controlled the many without responsibility or restraint. In that arrangement they conceived the strength of nations in war consisted. There was also something fascinating in the ease, luxury, and display of the higher orders, who drew their wealth from the toil of the laboring millions. ”

“ The carrying trade is the natural effect and symptom of great national wealth; but it does not seem to be the natural cause of it. Those statesmen who have been disposed to favor it with particular encouragements, seem to have mistaken the effect and symptom for the cause. ”

“ Those discoveries, then, by altering the physical powers of men, by changing their relations and connections, as well as by opening new fields for commerce, and new channels for carrying it on, form a very distinct epoch in the history of wealth and power, and alter greatly their nature in the detail ”

“ According to this liberal and generous system, therefore, the most advantageous method in which a landed nation can raise up artificers, manufacturers, and merchants of its own, is to grant the most perfect freedom of trade to the artificers, manufacturers, and merchants of all other nations. It thereby raises the value of the surplus produce of its own land, of which the continual increase gradually establishes a fund, which, in due time, necessarily raises up all the artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, whom it has occasion for. ”

“ What circumstances in the policy of Europe have given the trades which are carried on in towns so great an advantage over that which is carried on in the country, that private persons frequently find it more for their advantage to employ their capitals in the most distant carrying trades of Asia and America, than in the improvement and cultivation of the most fertile fields in their own neighbourhood, I shall endeavour to explain at full length in the two following books. ”