hose course is north or south, a circumstance that is
alone sufficient to ensure the possessors of them, under
Governments equally favourable to the extension of industry, a
much greater share of commerce and wealth than can possibly
belong to the inhabitants of these rivers whose course is in a
contrary direction: and this for the simplest reason; because
rivers of the former description contain within themselves, many
of those productions which the latter can only obtain from
abroad. In the one, therefore, there is not only a necessity for
having recourse to foreign supply, which does not exist in the
other, but also a great prevention to internal navigation,
arising from the sameness of produce, and the consequent
impediment to barter, which must prevail in a country where all
have the same commodities to dispose of, where all wish to sell
and none to buy. To this manifest superiority which rivers
runningon a meridian claim over those running on a parallel,
there is no counterpoise, since they both contain equal
facilities for exporting their surplus productions, and receiving
in exchange the superfluities of other countries. It may, indeed,
here be urged, that there is, upon the whole, no surplus produce
in the world; and that, as the surplus, whatever may be its
extent, of one country, may be always exchanged for that of
another, as great a variety of luxuries may be thus obtained by
the inhabitants of rivers that run in an eastern or western
direction as can possibly be raised by the inhabitants of rivers
that run in a northern or southern; and that consequently the
same stimulus to an inland navigation will be created by the
eventual distribution of the various commodities procured by
foreign commerce, as if they had been the products of the country
itself. To this it may be replied, that although a much greater
variety of products may undoubtedly be imported from foreign
countries, than can possibly be raised within the compass of any
one navigable river, such products cannot afterwards be sold at
so cheap a rate. In all countries, therefore, where such products
are imported from abroad, the increase in their price must
occasion a proportionate diminution in their consumption, and in
so far inevitably operate as a check to internal navigation.

This variety of production, and the additional encouragement
thus afforded by it, to what is well known to be one of the main
sources of national wealth, is sufficient