favour trade in some ways, could not be accomplished without repealing all tariffs and thus discarding the instrument by which trade could be directed into channels of national advantage. When he had pointed out that this was implied in the proposal he felt that he had demolished the whole thing, for he had the firmest conviction of the necessity for suppressing private interest and regulating trade for the national weal.
5. Other thinkers tried to frame a satisfactory system for promoting the power of the country by thinking out a scheme in which the different factors might work harmoniously; they relied not so much on new investigation as on more careful reflection. It was obvious that the regulations which had been made for encouraging manufactures and increasing the customs might be detrimental to the rent of land. Such for example was the case with the laws which prohibited the export of wool or encouraged the importation of pig-iron from America. Both the welfare of the landed interest and of the manufacturers were important objects of policy, but one conflicted with the other. What favoured the one might be detrimental to the other; hence it might frequently be necessary to balance the landed against the manufacturing interest, and try to give each its due development. Arthur Young was constantly complaining, under the influence of the French Physiocrats, that manufactures were unduly developed and the agricultural interest too much neglected. The right course, as he conceived, would be to develop agriculture first of all to its fullest extent,[1] with an easy confidence that manufactures and commerce would follow naturally in its wake. But whenever we get this idea of a due proportion between the various parts of the social fabric, we must have some ideal or form to which we desire to make our practice conform. The eighteenth century had a keen eye to proportion in the structure of buildings, and eagerly followed the classical type while adapting it to modern requirements; and in the same way their discussions of the due proportion between manufactures and agriculture imply some more or less definite conception of an ideal economic condition which should possess in its highest form the element of stability.
Sir James Steuart, who wrote in 1764,[2] was an author who deliberately devoted himself to working out such an ideal. He set himself to discover 'a good plan of economy'[3] by a wide course of
- ↑ Arthur Young, Farmers' Letters, 4.
- ↑ Works, iii. 166, some parts were written as early as 1756, ibid. i. 16.
- ↑ Ibid. i. 5.
