Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/176

174 It is afterwards admitted, however, that every trade on which we paid a balance in gold or silver was not to be set down as "guilty of exhausting our treasure;" on the principle that the goods we thus buy from a foreign country we may re-export, in whole or in part, for a greater sum of money than we paid for them. Thus, the following trades are also allowed to be profitable, or, at the least, not disadvantageous:—1. The East Country trade, "We buy," it is observed, "hemp, pitch, tar, and all sorts of naval stores from the East Country. Unless we did this, we could not fit out a single ship to sea. The goods we send to that country are by no means sufficient to even the account between us; we are forced to pay the balance in gold and silver, and this, as I have heard, amounts to 200,000l. per annum. Shall we be said, then, to lose so great an annual sum by our East Country trade? No, certainly; for, not to insist upon the numberless people that are employed and subsisted by shipping and navigation, we gain much more by our shipping than the above-mentioned sums from other countries with which we trade; and it is certain we could gain nothing this way if we had not first bought the naval stores." This may be true enough, bur it is subversive of the whole doctrine of the mercantile and manufacturing theories: if we are to account the trade with a foreign country beneficial when, although there is an excess of imports over exports, and consequently a balance to be paid for in money, the imports are yet such as are necessary to enable us to carry on some other gainful branch or branches of commerce, then we might be said to trade profitably even with a country from which we imported nothing but food, to be consumed as fast as it arrived, and to which we exported nothing but the money to pay for that food; for, assuredly, without the means of keeping ourselves alive, we could carry on no gainful trade or occupation whatever. And the same thing may be said of the purchase from abroad of any other article whether of necessity or convenience: if the article is one which we can procure at less cost in that way than by producing or manufacturing it at home we shall be gainers by so procuring it,