Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/31

 means to encrease our wealth and treasure is by Forraign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value" (p. 11); and, "we have no other means to get treasure but by forraign trade" (p. 85). He pleads for sumptuary laws, "so that men would soberly refrain from excessive consumption of foreign wares in their diet and rayment, with such often change of fashions as is used so much the more to encrease the waste and charge; which vices are more notorious amongst us than in former ages" (p. 16). In this way, he thinks, importations would be diminished, and the amount of wealth, i.e., treasure, annually received, be increased. He is, however, obliged to slightly modify his system, so far as to allow money to be occasionally carried out of the country, but only in order that it might return with other money that it had gathered as it rolled.

The importance, indeed, of the mercantile error lay not so much in the belief that money was synonymous with wealth as in the corollary from it, that wealth was only to be obtained by means of trade; and the later English writers were all more or less conscious of this. Glimmerings of the truth begin to appear among them. Sir William Temple, in his "Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands" (1672), writes: "The time of laboring or industrious men is the greatest native commodity of any country"; and Charles Davenant writes in 1696 ("Works," i. 382): "Industry and skill to improve the advantages of soil and situation are more truly riches to a people than even the possession of gold and silver mines." In Germany the mercantile theory had a great hold. Schröder gives one of the most thoroughgoing statements of the mercantilist position: "A country grows rich in proportion