to spicery, bullion,
ornamental cloths, and other objects of art and luxury.

It is important to recognise that in the first half of the eighteenth
century international trade still largely partook of this character.
Not only did it bear a far smaller proportion to the total industry of
the several countries than does foreign trade to-day, but it was still
engaged to a comparatively small extent with the transport of
necessaries or prime conveniences of life. Each nation, as regards the
more important constituents of its consumption, its staple foods,
articles of clothing, household furniture, and the chief implements of
industry, was almost self-sufficing, producing little that it did not
consume, consuming little it did not produce.

In 1712 the export trade of England is officially estimated at
L6,644,103,[4] or considerably less than one-sixth of the home trade
of that date as calculated by Smith in his _Memoirs of Wool_. Such an
estimate, however, gives an exaggerated impression of the relation of
foreign to home trade, because under the latter no account is taken of
the large domestic production of goods and services which figure in no
statistics. A more instructive estimate is that which values the total
consumption of the English people in 1713 at forty-nine or fifty
millions, out of which about four millions covers the consumption of
foreign goods.[5] In 1740 imports amounted to L6,703,778, exports to
L8,197,788. In 1750 they had risen respectively to L7,772,339 and
L12,699,081,[6] and ten years later to L9,832,802 and L14,694,970.
Macpherson, whose _Annals of Commerce_ are a mine of wealth upon the
history of foreign commerce in the eighteenth century, after
commenting upon the impossibility of obtaining a just estimate of the
value of home trade, alludes to a calculation which places it at
thirty-two times the size of the export trade. Macpherson contents
himself with concluding that it is "a vast deal greater in value than
the whole of the foreign trade."[7] There is every reason to believe
that in the case of Holland and France, the only two other European
nations with a considerable foreign trade, the same general conclusion
will apply.

[Illustration: PROGRESS OF FOREIGN TRADE IN ENGLAND.]

The smallness of the part which foreign trade played in industry
signifies that in the earlier part of the eighteenth century the
industrial organism as a whole must be regarded as a number of
tolerably self-s