commonly passes for the carrying trade of England will
frequently, perhaps, be found to be no more than a round-about
foreign trade of consumption. Such are, in a great measure, the
trades which carry the goods of the East and West Indies, and of
America, to different European markets. Those goods are generally
purchased either immediately with the produce of British
industry, or with something else which had been purchased with
that produce, and the final returns of those trades are generally
used or consumed in Great Britain. The trade which is carried on
in British bottoms between the different ports of the
Mediterranean, and some trade of the same kind carried on by
British merchants between the different ports of India, make,
perhaps, the principal branches of what is properly the carrying
trade of Great Britain.
The extent of the home trade and of the capital which can be
employed in it, is necessarily limited by the value of the
surplus produce of all those distant places within the country
which have occasion to exchange their respective productions with
another: that of the foreign trade of consumption, by the value
of the surplus produce of the whole country and of what can be
purchased with it: that of the carrying trade by the value of the
surplus produce of all the different countries in the world. Its
possible extent, therefore, is in a manner infinite in comparison
of that of the other two, and is capable of absorbing the
greatest capitals.
The consideration of his own private profit is the sole
motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it
either in agriculture, in manufactures, or in some particular
branch of the wholesale or retail trade. The different quantities
of productive labour which it may put into motion, and the
different values which it may add to the annual, produce of the
land and labour of the society, according as it is employed in
one or other of those different ways, never enter into his
thoughts. In countries, therefore, where agriculture is the most
profitable of all employments, and farming and improving the most
direct roads to a splendid fortune, the capitals of individuals
will naturally be employed in the manner most advantageous to the
whole society. The profits of agriculture, however, seem to have
no superiority over those of other employments in any part of
Europe. Projectors, indeed, in every corner of it, have within
these few years amused the public with most magnificent accounts
of the profits to be made by the cultivation and improvement of
land. Without entering into any particular discussion of their
calculations, a very simple observation may satisfy us that the
result of them must be false. We see every day the most splendid
fortunes that have been acquired in the course of a single life
by trade and manufacturers, frequently from a very small capital,
sometimes from no capital. A single instance of such a fortune
acquired by agriculture in the same time, and from such a
capital, has not, perhaps, occurred in Europe during the course
of the present century. In all the great countries of Europe,
however, much good land still remains uncultivated, and the
greater part of what is cultivated is far from being improved to
the degree of which it is capable. Agriculture, therefore, is
almost everywhere capable of absorbing a much greater capital
than has ever yet been employed in it. What circumstances in the
policy of Europe have given the trades which are carried on in
towns so great an advantage over that which is carried on in the
country that private persons frequently find it more for their
advantage to employ their capitals in the most distant carrying
trades of Asia and America than in the improvement and
cultivation of the most fertile fields in their own
neighbourhood, I shall endeavour to explain at full length in the
two following books.
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