Another circumstance which gives a superiority of commercial advantages to States that manufacture as well as cultivate consists in the more numerous attractions which a more diversified market offers to foreign customers and in the greater scope which it affords to mercantile enterprise. It is a position of indisputable truth in commerce depending, too, on very obvious reasons, that the greatest resort will ever be to those marts where commodities, while equally abundant, are most various. Each difference of kind holds out an additional inducement; and it is a position not less clear that the field of enterprise must be enlarged. to the merchants of a country in proportion to the variety as well as the abundance of commodities which they find at home, for exportation to foreign markets.
A third circumstance, perhaps not inferior to either of the other two, conferring the superiority which has been stated, has relation to the stagnations of demand for certain commodities, which, at some time or other, interfere more or less with the sale of all. The nation which can bring to market but few articles is likely to be more quickly and sensibly affected by such stagnations than one which is always possessed of a great variety of commodities; the former frequently finds too great a proportion of its stock of materials for sale or exchange lying on hand or is obliged to make injurious sacrifices to supply its wants of foreign articles which are numerous and urgent in proportion to the smallness of the number of its own. The latter commonly finds itself indemnified by the high prices of some articles for the low prices of others, and the prompt and advantageous sale of those articles which are in demand enables its merchants the better to wait for a favorable change in respect to those which are not. There is ground to believe that a difference of situation in this particular has immensely different effects upon the wealth and prosperity of nations.
From these circumstances, collectively, two important inferences are to be drawn: One, that there is always a higher probability of a favorable balance of trade, in regard to countries in which manufactures, founded on the basis of a thriving agriculture, flourish, than in regard to those which are confined wholly, or almost wholly, to agriculture; the other (which is also a consequence of the first) that countries of the former description are likely to possess more pecuniary wealth, or money, than those of the latter.
Facts appear to correspond with this conclusion. The importations of manufactured supplies seem invariably to drain the merely agricultural people of their wealth. Let the situation of the manufacturing countries of Europe be compared, in this particular, with that of countries which only cultivate and the disparity will be striking. Other cases, it is true, help to account for this disparity between some of them; and among these causes, the relative state of agriculture; but between others of them, the most prominent circumstances of dissimilitude arises from the comparative state of manufactures. In corroboration of the same idea, it ought not to escape remark that the West India Islands, the soils of which are the most fertile and the nation which, in the greatest degree, supplies the rest of the world with the precious metals, exchange to a loss with almost every other country.
As far as experience, at home, may guide, it will lead to the same conclusion. Previous to the Revolution, the quantity, of coin possessed by the Colonies which now compose the United States appeared
