ines for enriching the country,
therefore, were restraints upon importation and encouragements to
exportation.

The restraints upon importation were of two kinds: first, restraints
upon the importation of such foreign goods for home consumption as could
be produced at home, from whatever country they were imported; and
secondly, restraints upon the importation of goods of almost all kinds
from those particular countries with which the balance of trade was
supposed to be disadvantageous. These different restraints consisted
sometimes in high duties, and sometimes in absolute prohibitions.

Exportation was encouraged sometimes by drawbacks, sometimes by
bounties, sometimes by advantageous treaties of commerce with sovereign
states, and sometimes by the establishment of colonies in distant
countries. The above two restraints, and these four encouragements to
exportation, constitute the six principal means by which the commercial
or mercantile system proposes to increase the quantity of gold and
silver in any country by turning the balance of trade in its favour.

The entire system, in all its developments, is a fallacious and an evil
one. It is not difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of
this whole mercantile system: not the consumers, whose interest has been
entirely neglected; but the producers, and especially the merchants and
manufacturers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to. It
remains to be said, also, that the "agricultural system," which
represents the produce of land as the sole source of the revenue and
wealth of every country, and as therefore justifying a special
protection of it, is as fallacious and as harmful as the other.

_V.--The Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth_

The first duty of the sovereign, that of protecting the society from the
violence and invasion of other independent societies, can be performed
only by means of a military force. This may be effected either by
obliging all the citizens of the military age, or a certain number of
them, to join in some measure the trade of a soldier to whatever other
trade or profession they may happen to carry on; or by maintaining a
certain number of citizens in the constant practice of military
exercises, thus rendering the trade of a soldier a particular trade,
separate from all others. In the former case a militia is formed, in the
latter a standing army; and of the two, the second is by far the more
powerful, as it