Page:Mun - England's treasure by forraign trade.djvu/10

 probably written about 1630, was printed for the first time by his son in 1664. A 2nd edition appeared in 1669 ; a 3rd in 1698; a 4th, in one volume with Roberts' Merchants' Map of Commerce, in 1700; a 5th in 1713, during the discussion upon Bolingbroke's proposed commercial treaty with France ; and a 6th was published by Foulis at Glasgow in 1755. A copy of this last mentioned edition is known ta have been in the possession of Adam Smith. England's Treasure was also included in the (1856) volume of Tracts on Commerce before mentioned.

All accessible biographical and bibliographical details have been gathered by Mr. A. L. Hardy in his article in the Dictionary of National Biography, xxxix (1894), which has been freely drawn upon in the foregoing statement.

To readers of to-day the treatise here reprinted is known chiefly by the account of its argument given by Adam Smith ( Wealth of Nations, bk. iv, ch. i), and by his happy remark that "the title of Mun's book, England's Treasure in (sic) Foreign Trade, became a fundamental maxim in the political economy, not of England only, but of all other commercial countries." To Adam Anderson, in 1764 (Origin of Commerce, s. aa. 1663 and 1664), it was a "judicious" and "valuable treatise," in which it was "clearly shewn 'that nothing but an overbalance in foreign trade…can either increase our bullion or even keep what we have already'" ; and these phrases reappear unaltered in David Macpherson's Annals of Commerce in 1805. The importance in the history of economic thought assigned to it — whether correctly or no — by more recent writers, may be sufficiently illustrated by three examples. McCulloch (Literature of Political Economy, 1845) says that "Mun may be