undersell the inhabitants of Hindostan in the
manufacture of muslins from cotton growing on the banks of the Ganges;
but with all the advantages of chemical manure and tile draining, it is
undersold in the supply of food by the cultivators on the Mississippi.

This being a fixed law of nature, evidently intended to check the growth
of old states, and promote the extension of mankind in the uncultivated
parts of the earth, it is in vain to contend against it. So violently
does free-trade displace industry on both sides, where it is fully
established, that it is scarcely possible to conceive that two nations
should at the same time run into the same glaring mistake; and thence
the common complaint that no benefit is gained, but an infinite loss
sustained, by its establishment in any one country, and that reciprocity
is on one side only. As no adequate exchange of manufactures for
subsistence is thus to be looked for, there must arise, in the old
state, a constant exportation of the precious metals, attended by
frequent commercial crises, and a constant increase in the weight of
direct taxation. Should it prove otherwise, and two nations both go into
the same system, it could lead to no other result but the stoppage of
the growth of civilisation in the young one, and the destruction of
national independence in the old. The former would never succeed in
establishing commerce or manufactures, from the competition of the
steam-engine in its aged neighbour; the latter would become dependent
for subsistence on the plough of the young one. The rising agricultural
state would be chained for ever to the condition of the serfs in Poland,
or the boors in America; the stationary commercial state would fall into
the degrading dependence of ancient Rome on the harvests of Egypt and
Lybia.

Had it not been for the calamitous issue of the last harvest, in a part
of the empire, it might have been difficult to say, to which side the
weight of reason preponderated in these opposite arguments; and probably
the people of the country would have continued permanently divided on
them, according as their private interests or wishes were wound up with
the buying and selling, or raising and producing classes in society. But
an external calamity has intervened;--Providence has denied for a
season, to one of the fruits of the earth, its wonted increase. The
potato-rot has appeared; and nearly the whole subsistence of the people
in the south and wes