Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/224

, all the while of his working for silver, gathering also food for his necessary livelihood, and procuring himself covering, etc.—I say, the silver of the one must be esteemed of equal value with the corn of the other: the one being perhaps twenty ounces and the other twenty bushels. From whence it follows that the price of a bushel of this corn to be an ounce of silver.'

Successful trade he saw was a matter of exchange, and that the wealth of a country did not consist, as was then generally supposed, in the value of the exports exceeding that of the imports and the exporter gaining the difference in hard coin: but the value of the trade of any particular country was, on the contrary, to be ascertained—by adding the values—so far as they could be ascertained, of the imports and exports together, not forgetting to take into account the value of the payments made for freight and seamen's wages and the value of cash payments received from abroad.

But while thus understanding the great central truths of commercial economy, he did not push them to their logical result or always hold clearly to his own principles. Thus he says in the 'Treatise on Taxes' that, 'as for the prohibition of importations, it need not be until they much exceed our exportations.' Again, wishing apparently to make some concessions to his adversaries, after exposing the absurdity of prohibitions, he acknowledges that nevertheless 'if the Hollanders' advantages in making cloth be but small and few in comparison of ours, that is if they have but a little the better of us, then that prohibition to export wool may sufficiently turn the scale.' The 'measures of customs' which, developing this idea, he describes and classifies in the 'Treatise on Taxes' seem to give a carefully-thought-out view of a system of trade by which the home producer might be secured to a certain extent, without the volume of trade being seriously checked. A closer analysis would probably have led him to see that this was logically inconsistent with a condemnation of attempts to regulate the tides and to persuade water to rise