and
direction on the other; and our reader, I dare say, will acknowledge there
is reason for both.

It must in the first place be acknowledged, that England has indeed the
greatest encouragement for their industry of any nation in Europe; and as
therefore their want of improving those advantages and encouragements,
lays them more open to our just reproof, than other nation's would be, or
can be who want them, so it moves me with the more importunity to press
home the argument, which reason and the nature of the thing furnishes, to
persuade them. Reason dictates that no occasion should be let slip by
which England above all nations in the world should improve the advantages
they have in their hands; not only because they have them, but because
their people so universally depend upon them. The manufactures are their
bread, the life, the comfort of their poor, and the soul of their trade;
nature dictates, that as they are given them to improve, and that by
industry and application they are capable of being improved; so they ought
to starve if they do not improve them to the utmost.

Let us see in a few words what nature and providence has done for us; nay,
what they have done for us exclusive of the rest of the world. The bounty
of Heaven has stored us with the principles of commerce, fruitful of a
vast variety of things essential to trade, and which call upon us as it
were in the voice of nature, bidding us work, and with annexed
encouragement to do so from the visible apparent success of industry. Here
the voice of the world is plain, like the answer of an oracle; thus, dig
and find, plough and reap, fish and take, spin and live; in a word, trade
and thrive; and this with such extraordinary circumstances, that it is as
if there was a bar upon the neighbouring nations, and it had been spoken
from Heaven thus: These are for you only, and not for any other nation;
you, my favourites, of England; you, singled out to be great, opulent,
powerful, above all your neighbours, and to be made so by your own
industry and my bounty.

To explain this, allow me a small digression, to run over the detail of
Heaven's bounty, and see what God and nature has done for us beyond what
it has done for other nations; nature, as I have said, will dictate to us
what Heaven expects from us, for the improving the blessings bestowed, and
for making ourselves that rich and powerful people which he has determined
us to be.

Our country is furnish