Page:The wealth of nations, volume 2.djvu/78

 the greater part of its exportation trade be carried on by foreigners. The progress of our North America and West Indian colonies would have been much less rapid, had no capital but what belonged to themselves been employed in exporting their surplus produce.

According to the natural course of things, therefore, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterward to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce. This order of things is so very natural that, in every society that had any territory, it has always, I believe, been in some degree observed. Some of their lands must have been cultivated before any considerable towns could be established, and some sort of coarse industry of the manufacturing kind must have been carried on in those towns before they could well think of employing themselves in foreign commerce.

But though this natural order of things must have taken place in some degree in every such society, it has in all the modern States of Europe been, in many respects, entirely inverted. The foreign commerce of some of their cities has introduced all their finer manufactures, or such as were fit for distant sale; and manufactures and foreign commerce together have given birth to the principal improvements of agriculture. The manners and customs which the nature of their original government introduced, and which remained after that government was greatly altered, necessarily forced them into this unnatural and retrograde order.