the old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant;
the individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and
so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke, "grows
rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and while there
is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning attached to it by
the mercantilists was that foreign competition meant national weakness.
They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable to
both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense; wherefore a
woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment. Even
Davenant, who was in many respects on the high road to free trade, was
in this problem adamant. Protection was essential in the colonial
market; for unless the trade of the colonies was directed through
England they might be dangerous rivals. So Ireland and America were
sacrificed to the fear of British merchants, with the inevitable result
that repression brought from both the obvious search for remedy.

Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to contribute; yet
nothing is more certain than that his full sense of the world as the
only true unit of marketing was fully grasped before him. In 1691 Sir
Dudley North published his _Discourses upon Trade_. Therein he clearly
sees that commercial barriers between Great Britain and France are
basically as senseless as would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire
and Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North goes even further than Adam
Smith, for he argues against the usury laws in terms Bentham would
hardly have disowned. Ten years later an anonymous writer in a tract
entitled _Considerations on the East India Trade_ (1701) has no
illusions about the evil of monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that
the real problem is not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation
actually possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most
efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory with
the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water beyond its
proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a free trader, and
his opinion of the American war was that it was as mad as those who
fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the Holy Land"; and he
urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with Ireland in the interest of
commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis of the Physiocrats upon free
trade be forgotten. There is no e