of rude for manufactured produce, either
immediately, or by the intervention of money, or of some sort of paper
which represents money. The country supplies the town with the means of
subsistence, and the materials for manufacture. The town repays this
supply by sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the
inhabitants of the country. The town, in which there neither is nor can
be any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its
whole subsistence from the country. And in how great a degree the
country is benefited by the commerce of the town may be seen from a
comparison of the cultivation of the lands in the neighbourhood of any
considerable town with that of those which He at some distance from it.

As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and
luxury, so the rural industries which procure the former must be prior
to the urban industries which minister to the latter. The greater part
of the capital of every growing society is therefore first directed to
agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign
commerce. But this natural order of things has, in all the modern states
of Europe, been in many respects entirely inverted. The foreign commerce
of some of their cities has given rise to their finer manufactures, and
manufactures and foreign commerce together have given birth to the
principal improvements of agriculture. The manners and customs which the
nature of their original government introduced, and which remained after
that government was greatly altered, necessarily forced them into this
unnatural and retrograde order.

In the ancient state of Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire,
agriculture was greatly discouraged by several causes. The rapine and
violence which the barbarians exercised against the ancient inhabitants
interrupted the commerce between the towns and the country; the towns
were deserted and the country was left uncultivated. The western
provinces of Europe sank into the lowest state of poverty, and the land,
which was mostly uncultivated, was engrossed by a few great proprietors.

These lands might in the natural course of events have been soon divided
again, and broken into small parcels by succession or by alienation; but
the law of primogeniture hindered their division by succession, and the
introduction of entails prevented their being divided by alienation.
These hindrances to the division and consequently to the