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the earth is recompensed, perhaps, by receiving forty out of it; and he who draws a fish out of our water draws up a piece of silver.

Let us (and there is no doubt but we shall) be attentive to these, and then the power of rivals, with all their restraining and prohibiting acts, cannot much hurt us. We are sons of the earth and seas; and, like Antæus in the fable, if, in wrestling with a Hercules, we now and then receive a fall, the touch of our parents will communicate to us fresh strength and vigor to renew the contest.

[From the Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 409, Oct. 14, 1736.]

ON DISCOVERIES.

THE world, but a few ages since, was in a very poor condition as to trade and navigation, nor indeed were they much better in other matters of useful knowledge. It was a green-headed time. Every useful improvement was hid from them; they had neither looked into heaven nor earth, into the sea nor land, as has been done since. They had philosophy without experiments, mathematics without instruments, geometry without scale, astronomy without demonstration.

They made war without powder, shot, cannon or mortars; nay, the mob made their bonfires without squibs or crackers. They went to sea without compass, and sailed without the needle. They viewed the stars without telescopes, and measured latitudes without observation. Learning had no printing-press, writing no paper, and paper no ink; the lover was forced to send his mistress a deal board for a love-letter, and a billet-doux might be the size of an ordinary trencher. They were clothed without manufacture, and their richest robes were the skins of the most formidable monsters; they carried on trade without books, and correspondence without posts; their merchants kept no accounts, their shop-keepers no cash-books; they had surgery without anatomy, and physicians without the materia medica; they gave emetics without ipecacuanha, drew blisters without cantharides, and cured agues without the bark.

As for geographical discoveries, they had neither seen the North Cape nor the Cape of Good Hope south. All the discovered inhabited world which they knew and conversed with was circumscribed within very narrow limits, namely, France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Greece; the Lesser Asia,

the west part of Persia, Arabia, the north parts of Africa, and the islands of the Mediterranean Sea; and this was the whole world to them; - not that even these countries were fully known, neither, and several parts of them not inquired into at all. Germany was known little further than the banks of the Elbe; Poland as little beyond the Vistula, or Hungary a little beyond the Danube; Muscovy, or Russia, perfectly unknown, as much as China beyond it, and India only by a little commerce upon the coast about Surat and Malabar; Africa had been more unknown, but, by the ruin of the Carthagenians, all the western coast of it was sunk out of knowledge again, and forgotten; the northern coast of Africa, in the Mediterranean, remained known, and that was all, for the Saracens, overrunning the nations which were planted there, ruined commerce as well as religion; the Baltic Sea was not discovered, nor even the navigation of it known, for the Teutonic knights came not thither till the 13th century.

The

America was not heard of, nor so much as a suggestion in the minds of men that any part of the world lay that way. coasts of Greenland or Spitzbergen, and the whale-fishing, not known; the best navigators in the world, at that time, would have fled from a whale with much more fright and horror than from the devil in the most terrible shapes they had been told he appeared in.

The coasts of Angola, Congo, the Gold and the Grain coasts, on the west side of Africa, from whence since that time such immense wealth has been drawn, not discovered, nor the least inquiry made after them. All the East India and China trade, not only undiscovered, but out of the reach of expectation! Coffee and tea (those modern blessings of mankind) had never been heard of: all the unbounded ocean we now call the South Sca was hid and unknown: all the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the mouth of the Straits, was frightful and terrible in the distant prospect, nor durst any one peep into it, otherwise than as they might creep along the coast of Africa towards Sallee, or Santa Cruz. The North Sea was hid in a veil of impenetrable darkness; the White Sea, or Archangel, was a very modern discovery, not found out till Sir Hugh Willoughby doubled the North Cape, and paid dear for the adventure, being frozen to death with all his crew on the coast of Lapland, while his companion's ship, with the famous Mr. Chancellor, went on to the Gulf of Russia, called the White Sea, where no Christian strangers had ever been before him.

In these narrow circumstances stood the world's knowledge at

the beginning of the fifteenth century, when men of genius bogan to look abroad and about them. Now, as it was wonderful to see a world so full of people, and people so capable of improving, yet so stupid and so blind, so ignorant and so perfectly unimproved, it was wonderful to see with what a general alacrity they took the alarm almost all together; preparing themselves, as it were, on a sudden, by a general inspiration, to spread knowledge through the earth, and to search into everything that it was impossible to uncover.

How surprising is it to look back, so little a way behind us, and see that even in less than two hundred years all this (now so self-wise) part of the world did not so much as know whether there was any such place as a Russia, a China, a Guinea, a Greenland, or a North Cape! That, as to America, it was never supposed there was any such place; neither had the world, though they stood upon the shoulders of four thousand years' experience, the least thought so much as that there was any land that way!

As they were ignorant of places, so of things also; so vast are the improvements of science, that all our knowledge of mathematics, of nature, of the brightest part of human wisdom, had their admission among us within these two last centuries. What was the world, then, before? And to what were the heads and hands of mankind applied? The rich had no commerce, the poor no employment; war and the sword was the great field of honor, — the stage of preferment, — and you have scarce a man eminent in the world for anything before that time, but for a furious, outrageous falling upon his fellow-creatures, like Nimrod and his successors of modern memory.

The world is now daily increasing in experimental knowledge; and let no man flatter the age with pretending we have arrived to a perfection of discoveries.

"What's now discovered only serves to show

That nothing's known, to what is yet to know."

POSITIONS TO BE EXAMINED CONCERNING NATIONAL WEALTH.

1. ALL food or subsistence for mankind arise from the earth or waters.

2. Necessaries of life that are not food, and all other con

veniences, have their value estimated by the proportion of food consumed while we are employed in procuring them.

3. A small people, with a large territory, may subsist on the productions of nature, with no other labor than of gathering the vegetables and catching the animals.

4. A large people, with a small territory, finds these insufficient, and, to subsist, must labor the earth to make it produce greater quantities of vegetable food suitable for the nourishment of men, and of the animals they intend to eat.

5. From this labor arises a great increase of vegetable and animal food, and of materials for clothing, as flax, wool, silk, &c. The superfluity of these is wealth. With this wealth we pay for the labor employed in building our houses, cities, &c., which are, therefore, only subsistence thus metamorphosed.

6. Manufactures are only another shape into which so much provisions and subsistence are turned as were equal in value to the manufactures produced. This appears, from hence, that the manufacturer does not, in fact, obtain from the employer for his labor more than a mere subsistence, including raiment, fuel and shelter all which derive their value from the provisions consumed in procuring them.

7. The produce of the earth, thus converted into manufactures, may be more easily carried to distant markets than before such conversion.

8. Fair commerce is where equal values are exchanged for equal, the expense of transport included. Thus, if it costs A in England as much labor and charge to raise a bushel of wheat as it costs B in France to produce four gallons of wine, then are four gallons of wine the fair exchange for a bushel of wheat, A and B meeting at half distance with their commodities to make the exchange. The advantage of this fair commerce is that each party increases the number of his enjoyments, having, instead of wheat alone, or wine alone, the use of both wheat and wine.

9. Where the labor and expense of producing both commodities are known to both parties, bargains will generally be fair and equal. Where they are known to one party only, bargains will often be unequal, knowledge taking its advantage of igno

rance.

10. Thus he that carries one thousand bushels of wheat abroad to sell may not probably obtain so great a profit thereon as if he had first turned the wheat into manufactures, by subsisting therewith the workmen while producing those manufactures: since there are many expediting and facilitating methods

of working not generally known; and strangers to the manufactures, though they know pretty well the expense of raising wheat, are unacquainted with those short methods of working, and thence, being apt to suppose more labor employed in the manufactures than there really is, are more easily imposed on in their value, and induced to allow more for them than they are honestly worth.

11. Thus the advantage of having manufactures in a country does not consist, as is commonly supposed, in their highly advancing the value of rough materials, of which they are formed; since, though sixpenny-worth of flax may be worth twenty shillings when worked into lace, yet the very cause of its being worth twenty shillings is, that, besides the flax, it has cost nineteen shillings and sixpence in subsistence to the manufacturer. But the advantage of manufactures is, that under their shape provisions may be more easily carried to a foreign market, and by their means our traders may more easily cheat strangers. Few, where it is not made, are judges of the value of lace. The importer may demand forty, and perhaps get thirty shillings, for that which cost him but twenty.

12. Finally, there seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, by plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God, in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.

April 4, 1769.

[From the Pennsylvania Gazette, April 8, 1736.]

GOVERNMENT.

says,

AN ancient of the law* sage the king can do no wrong; for if he doeth wrong he is not the king. And, in another place, — when the king doth justice he is God's vicar, but when he doth unjustly he is the agent of the devil. The politeness

*Bracton de leg. Angl. An author of great weight, contemporary with Henry III.

+ Rex non facit injuriam, qui si facit injuriam, non est rex.

Dum facit justitiam vicarius est regis æterni minister autere diaboli dum declinet ad injuriam.

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