Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/222

 responsibility of choice as to the goods which are to be allowed to enter. The prohibition of the export of money, he also points out, diminishes the selling power of the English merchant by depriving him of an article, money, which he could bargain with like any other: in this following the arguments of Mun and others, who had pleaded for a remission of the rate against the export of specie to the East, and urged that the sale of Indian imports would bring in an amount of the precious metals far larger than the silver exported to purchase them. As to wool, of which, as already stated, it was proposed to prohibit the export, in order to destroy the Dutch trade in the manufactured article, he points out that the prohibition 'would perhaps do twice as much harm as the loss of the trade.' It would have as an effect that the English producer would raise the price of his article by diminishing the supply, of which there were 'such gluts upon our hands.' Why, he asks, did not the English producer of wool turn his pasture into arable, thereby obviating the necessity of importing such large quantities of corn from abroad, and stop money going abroad to pay for that corn, thereby giving employment to many, instead of 'one man by the way of grazing, tilling as it were many thousand of acres of land by himself and his dog?'

'Suppose,' he goes on, 'our Hollanders outdo us by more art, were it not better to draw over a number of their choice workmen, or send our most ingenious men thither to learn; in which, if they succeeded, it is most manifest that this were the more natural way, than to keep that infinite clatter about resisting of nature, stopping up the winds and seas, etc. If we can make victuals much cheaper here than in Holland, take away burthensome, frivolous and antiquated impositions and offices; I conceive even this were better than to persuade water to rise of itself above its natural spring. We must consider in general that as wise physicians tamper not exceedingly with their patients, rather observing and