"Ceux qui out écrit les premiers sur cette matière importante, séduits par l'apparence des faits, out attribué aux mêtaux précieux, obtenus en retour de l'exportation des produits du sol et de l'industrie de chaque pays, la cause de la richesse des peuples.(184)"D'autres écrivains en ont placé la source duns la réduction de l'intérêt de l'argent.(185)"Les économistes, entraînés par une théorie séduisante et captieuse, ont exalté le systême agricole.(186)"Adam-Smith lui a préféré le travail qui se perfectionne par sa division, et qui, après qu'il est fini, se fixe et se réalise duns un objet permanent.(187)"Lord Lauderdalc, dans l'ouvrage précité ouvrage remarquable par la finesse de ses aperçus, fait dériver la richesse de l'art de simplifier et d'abréger le travail et d'améliorer ses produits, résultat nécessaire de l'accumulation et de la direction des capitaux.
"M.Say fair dériver la plus grande augmentation de la richesse, de l'emploi des capitaux dans l'agriculture.(188)"De l'union des systèmes d'agriculture et de commerce, dit M.
Malthus, dépend la plus grande prospérité nationale.(189)"M.Ricardo est d'avis que ]a tichesse d'un pays s'accrolt de deux manières:
par l'emploi d'une portion plus considérable du revenue àl'accroissement du travail productif, ou en rendant plus productive cclle qui existe.(190)"M.Sismondi ne voit l'accroissement des richesses que duns l'accroissement des jouissances nationales." (191) Ganilh des Systems, Tome 1.p.14.
NOTE C.
At the time the reference to this note was made, it was my intention to have here inserted some extracts from the North American Review, and some other publications, for the purpose of showing the views entertained in this country concerning the system of Adam Smith, and some of his followers.
As far as concerns this continent, however, these extracts would be superfluous, and I have, therefore, thought it better to omit them, until such time as the work appear in Great Britain.
NOTE D.
Adam Smith here admits, to a certain extent, the correctness of general notions concerning the nature and office of money, entertained by the school of political economists who preceded Hume.Had he done otherwise he would have acted very unfairly, for his own reasonings, on this subject, are sometimes little more than a repetition of theirs, as might be shown by an examination of parallel passages.Compare, for instance, the two following.
"Although they who have their estates in money are said to be a great number, and to be worth £5,000 or £10,000 per annum, more or less, which amounts to many millions in all, yet are they not possessed thereof altogether at once, for it were vanity or against their profit to keep continually in their hands above £40 or £50 in a family to defray necessary charges.The rest must ever run from man to man in traffic for their benefit, whereby we may conceive that a little money (being made the measure of all our other means) doth rule and distribute great matters daily to all men in their just proportions." (192) As the same guinea which pays the weekly pension of one man to day, may pay that of another tomorrow, and that of a third the day thereafter, the amount of the metal pieces which annually circulate in any country must always be of much less value than the whole money pensions annually paid with them." (193)The more recent followers of Adam Smith have not always done the earlier writers equal justice.Thus Mr.McCulloch, in his Principles of Political Economy, asserts that the mercanti1e system, of which he esteems Mun one of the earliest and ablest defenders, reckoned money the only wealth, and remarks, that "the simple consideration, that all buying and selling is in reality nothing more than the bartering of one commodity for another, -- of a certain quantity of corn or wool, for example, for a certain quantity of gold or silver, and vice versa, was entirely overlooked." Now instead of considering money as the only wealth, Mun, on the contrary, says, "they that have wares cannot want money; -- neither is it that money is the life of trade as if it could not subsist without the same; for we know that there was great trading by way of commutation or barter, when there was little money stirring in the world." (194) That the true use of money is its affording a fixed standard for the price of other things, is a doctrine, indeed, laid down by Berlin a century earlier than Mun."Car si la monoye, qui doit regler le prix de routes choses est muable et incertaine, il n'y a personne qui puisse fair estat au vray de ce qu'il a; les contracts seront incertains les changes taxes gages, etc.
incertaines." etc.(195) The real error of those writers was their transferring to national wealth the rules which apply to individual wealth; it was I apprehend, therefore, the same in kind as I have hinted in the text, as that of Adam Smith himself, though different from it in degree.
NOTE E.
