Page:The wealth of nations, volume 2.djvu/364

 more advantageous to the country than anyother which it could have found.

The most advantageous employment of any capital to the country to which it belongs, is that which maintains there the greatest quantity of productive labor, and increases the most the annual produce of the land and labor of that country. But the quantity of productive labor which any capital employed in the foreign trade of consumption can maintain, is exactly in proportion, it has been shown in the Second Book, to the frequency of its returns. A capital of a thousand pounds, for example, employed in a foreign trade of consumption, of which the returns are made regularly once in the year, can keep in constant employment, in the country to which it belongs, a quantity of productive labor equal to what a thousand pounds can maintain there for a year. If the returns are made twice or thrice in the year, it can keep in constant employment a quantity of productive labor equal to what two or three thousand pounds can maintain there for a year. A foreign trade of consumption carried on with a neighboring, is, upon this account, in general, more advantageous than one carried on with a distant country; and for the same reason a direct foreign trade of consumption, as it has likewise been shown in the Second Book, is in general more advantageous than a roundabout one.

But the monopoly of the colony trade, so far as it has operated upon the employment of the capital of Great Britain, has in all cases forced some part of it from a foreign trade of consumption carried on with a neighboring, to one carried on with a more distant country, and in many cases from a direct foreign trade of consumption to a round-about one.