she must have cotton in large quantities, she will buy
the article where she can find it best and cheapest; and that it would
be quite ridiculous in her, manufacturing as she still would be, for her
own vast consumption and the consumption of millions in other countries,
to reject our uplands because we had learned to manufacture a part of
them for ourselves. Would it not be equally ridiculous in us, if the
commodities of Russia were both cheaper and better suited to our wants
than could be found elsewhere, to abstain from commerce with her,
because she will not receive in return other commodities which we have
to sell, but which she has no occasion to buy?

Intimately connected, Sir, with this topic, is another which has been
brought into the debate; I mean the evil so much complained of, the
exportation of specie. We hear gentlemen imputing the loss of market at
home to a want of money, and this want of money to the exportation of
the precious metals. We hear the India and China trade denounced, as a
commerce conducted on our side, in a great measure, with gold and
silver. These opinions, Sir, are clearly void of all just foundation,
and we cannot too soon get rid of them. There are no shallower reasoners
than those political and commercial writers who would represent it to be
the only true and gainful end of commerce, to accumulate the precious
metals. These are articles of use, and articles of merchandise, with
this additional circumstance belonging to them, that they are made, by
the general consent of nations, the standard by which the value of all
other merchandise is to be estimated. In regard to weights and measures,
something drawn from external nature is made a common standard, for the
purposes of general convenience: and this is precisely the office
performed by the precious metals, in addition to those uses to which, as
metals, they are capable of being applied. There may be of these too
much or too little in a country at a particular time, as there may be of
any other articles. When the market is overstocked with them, as it
often is, their exportation becomes as proper and as useful as that of
other commodities, under similar circumstances. We need no more repine,
when the dollars which have been brought here from South America are
despatched to other countries, than when coffee and sugar take the same
direction. We often deceive ourselves, by attributing to a scarcity of
money that which is the result of