79.

Nor can the stop of its vent, in this or that part of the world, greatly
affect it; if foreign trade abates its demand in one place, it increases
it in another; and it certainly goes on increasing prodigiously every
year, in direct confutation of the phlegmatic assertions of those, who,
with as much malice as ignorance, endeavour to run it down, and depreciate
its worth as well as credit, by their ill-grounded calculations.

We might call for evidence in this cause the vast increase of our
exportation in the woollen manufactures only to Portugal; which, for above
twenty-five years past, has risen from a very moderate trade to such a
magnitude, that we now export more woollen goods in particular yearly to
Portugal, than both Spain and Portugal took off before, notwithstanding
Spain has been represented as so extraordinary a branch of trade. The
occasion of this increase is fully explained, by the said Plan of the
English Commerce, to be owing to the increase of the Portuguese colonies
in the Brazils, and in the kingdoms of Congo and Angola on the west side
of Africa; and of Melinda and the coast of Zanguebar on the east side; in
all which the Portuguese have so civilized the natives and black
inhabitants of the country, as to bring them, where they went even stark
naked before, to clothe decently and modestly now, and to delight to do
so, in such a degree as they will hardly ever be brought to go unclothed
again; and all these nations are clothed more or less with our English
woollen manufactures, and the same in proportion in their East India
factories.

The like growth and increase of our own colonies, is another article to
confirm this argument, viz., that the consumption of our manufactures is
increased: it is evident that the number of our people, inhabitants of
those colonies, visibly increases every day; so must by a natural
consequence the consumption of the cloths they wear.

And this increase is so great, and is so demonstrably growing every day
greater, that it is more than equal to all the decrease occasioned by the
check or prohibitions put upon our manufactures, whether by the imitation
of the French or any other European nation.

I might dwell upon this article, and extend the observation to the East
Indies, where a remarkable difference is evident between the present and
the past times; for whereas a few years past the quantity of European
goods, whether of English or other manufactures, was very