ral but whether a country the most manufacturing of any
ever recorded in history, with an agriculture however as yet nearly
keeping pace with it, would be improved in its happiness, by a great
relative increase to its manufacturing population and relative check
to its agricultural population.

Many of the questions both in morals and politics seem to be of the
nature of the problems de maximis and minimis in fluxions; in which
there is always a point where a certain effect is the greatest,
while on either side of this point it gradually diminishes.

With a view to the permanent happiness and security from great
reverses of the lower classes of people in this country, I should
have little hesitation in thinking it desirable that its agriculture
should keep pace with its manufactures, even at the expense of
retarding in some degree the growth of manufactures; but it is a
different question, whether it is wise to break through a general
rule, and interrupt the natural course of things, in order to
produce and maintain such an equalization.

3dly. It may be urged, that though a comparatively low value of
the precious metals, or a high nominal price of corn and labour,
tends rather to check commerce and manufactures, yet its effects are
permanently beneficial to those who live by the wages of labour.

If the labourers in two countries were to earn the same quantity of
corn, yet in one of them the nominal price of this corn were twenty
five per cent higher than in the other, the condition of the
labourers where the price of corn was the highest, would be
decidedly the best. In the purchase of all commodities purely
foreign; in the purchase of those commodities, the raw materials of
which are wholly or in part foreign, and therefore influenced in a
great degree by foreign prices, and in the purchase of all home
commodities which are taxed, and not taxed ad valorem, they would
have an unquestionable advantage: and these articles altogether are
not inconsiderable even in the expenditure of a cottager.

As one of the evils therefore attending the throwing open our ports,
it may be stated, that if the stimulus to population, from the
cheapness of grain, should in the course of twenty or twenty five
years reduce the earnings of the labourer to the same quantity of
corn as at present, at the same price as in the rest of Europe, the
condition of the lower classes of people in this country would be
deteriorated. And if they shou