Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/203

Rh from you is but as moisture drawn from the earth, which gathers into a cloudy and falls back upon the earth again." All this, too, however (only substituting the government for the king, who in that age was the whole government), is still the faith of many people in our own day, when the spark of truth that lies in the heart of the error, and has kept it so long alive, is hardly so considerable a particle as it was in the circumstances in which Cardinal Morton propounded his ingenious metaphor. The economical evil of a large diversion of the public wealth into the hands of the government is not that the money so paid over is absorbed or lost to the public, as if it were buried in the ground or thrown into the sea; in so far at least as it is expended in the country, which nearly all of it usually is, it does undoubtedly descend again to the sources from which it was drawn, as the moisture that rises from the earth in vapour falls back upon it in showers. The objection is, not that any part of it is absolutely lost to the country, but that, as expended by the government, it is not expended so advantageously for the interests of industry and production as it would have been if it had been left in the pockets of the people. There is nothing lost; but there is not so much gained in the one case as there would have been in the other. The reproduction is less; the accumulation of the capital of the community does not go on so fast. However, there may perhaps be a state of circumstances in which it is for the general advantage that a portion of the public wealth should be impelled by force in a certain direction, for the sake of forming and maintaining somewhere a larger reservoir of capital than would otherwise anywhere exist: the general rule may be that capital should be allowed to diffuse itself freely, because in that way the increase will, upon the whole, be the largest; but there may be an exception for the case of an early society, which would labour under the disadvantage of having no capital but what was distributed in driblets unless some system of artificial drainage were put in