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( 24 ), though perhaps not quite so transparent. Not a penny does the nation get (I mean the total number of individuals concerned in productive industry of all kinds) not a penny does the nation get by this preference of bad articles to good ones, more than it would otherwise. In France, any more than any where else, people do not get more by the goods they produce than if there were no such monopoly: for if the rate of profit in the articles thus favoured were higher one moment, competition would pull it down the next. All that results from the monopoly you thus give yourselves of the custom of your colonies is, that goods of all sorts are somewhat worse for the money all over the world than they would be otherwise. People in France are engaged to produce, for the consumption of the French Colonies, goods in which they succeed not so well as England for example, instead of producing for their own consumption, or that of some other nation, goods in which they succeed better than England. People in England on the other hand, being so far kept from producing the goods they could have succeeded best in, are in so far turned aside to the production of goods in which they do not succeed so well: and thus it is all the world over.