The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface
• Key to Abbreviations and References
• General Introduction
• The Text and Apparatus
• Advertisement a
• Advertisement to the Fourth Edition
• Introduction and Plan of the Work
• [i] Book I: Of the Causes of Improvement In the Productive Powers of Labour, and of the Order According to Which Its Produce Is Naturally Distributed Among the Different Ranks of the People
• [i.i] Chapter I: Of the Division of Labour
• [i.ii] Chapter II: Of the Principle Which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour
• [i.iii] Chapter III: That the Division of Labour Is Limited By the Extent of the Market 1
• [i.iv] Chapter IV: Of the Origin and Use of Money 1
• [i.v] Chapter V: Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, Or of Their Price In Labour, and Their Price In Money
• [i.vi] Chapter VI: Of the Component Parts of the Price of Commodities
• [i.vii] Chapter VII: Of the Natural and Market Price of Commodities 1
• [i.viii] Chapter VIII: Of the Wages of Labour
• [i.ix] Chapter IX: Of the Profits of Stock
• [i.x.a] Chapter X: Of Wages and Profit In the Different Employments of Labour and Stock
• [i.x.b] Part I: Inequalities Arising From the Nature of the Employments Themselves
• [i.x.c] Part II: Inequalities Occasioned By the Policy of Europe
• [i.xi.a] Chapter XI: Of the Rent of Land
• [i.xi.b] Part I: Of the Produce of Land Which Always Affords Rent
• [i.xi.c] Part II: Of the Produce of Land Which Sometimes Does, and Sometimes Does Not, Afford Rent
• [i.xi.d] Part III: Of the Variations In the Proportion Between the Respective Values of That Sort of Produce Which Always Affords Rent, and of That Which Sometimes Does, and Sometimes Does Not, Afford Rent
• Digression Concerning the Variations In the Value of Silver During the Course of the Four Last Centuries
• [i.xi.e] First Period
• [i.xi.f] Second Period
• [i.xi.g] Third Period
• [i.xi.h] Variations In the Proportion Between the Respective Values of Gold and Silver
• [i.xi.i] Grounds of the Suspicion That the Value of Silver Still Continues to Decrease
• [i.xi.j] Different Effects of the Progress of Improvement Upon the Real Price of Three Different Sorts of Rude Produce
• [i.xi.k] First Sort
• [i.xi.l] Second Sort
• [i.xi.m] Third Sort
• [i.xi.n] Conclusion of the Digression Concerning the Variations In the Value of Silver
• [i.xi.o] Effects of the Progress of Improvement Upon the Real Price of Manufactures
• [i.xi.p] Conclusion of the Chapter
• [ii] Book II: Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock
• Introduction
• [ii.i] Chapter I: Of the Division of Stock
• [ii.ii] Chapter II: Of Money Considered As a Particular Branch of the General Stock of the Society, Or of the Expence of Maintaining the National Capital
• [ii.iii] Chapter III: Of the Accumulation of Capital, Or of Productive and Unproductive Labour
• [ii.iv] Chapter IV: Of Stock Lent At Interest
• [ii.v] Chapter V: Of the Different Employment of Capitals
• [iii] Book III: Of the Different Progress of Opulence In Different Nations
• [iii.i] Chapter I: Of the Natural Progress of Opulence
• [iii.ii] Chapter II: Of the Discouragement of Agriculture In the Antient State of Europe After the Fall of the Roman Empire 1
• [iii.iii] Chapter III: Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns, After the Fall of the Roman Empire
• [iii.iv] Chapter IV: How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country
• [iv] Book IV: Of Systems of Political Oeconomy
• Introduction
• [iv.i] Chapter I: Of the Principle of the Commercial, Or Mercantile System 1
• [iv.ii] Chapter II: Of Restraints Upon the Importation a From Foreign Countries of Such Goods a As Can Be Produced At Home
• [iv.iii] Chapter III: Of the Extraordinary Restraints Upon the Importation of Goods of Almost All Kinds, From Those Countries With Which the Balance Is Supposed to Be Disadvantageous
• [iv.iii.a] Part I: Of the Unreasonableness of Those Restraints Even Upon the Principles of the Commercial System a
• [iv.iii.b] Digression Concerning Banks of Deposit, Particularly Concerning That of Amsterdam 1
• [iv.iii.c] Part II: Of the Unreasonableness of Those Extraordinary Restraints Upon Other Principles a
• [iv.iv] Chapter IV: Of Drawbacks
• [iv.v.a] Chapter V: Of Bounties
• [iv.v.b] Digression Concerning the Corn Trade and Corn Laws a – a

BOOK III

Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations

CHAPTER I

Of the natural Progress of Opulence

1The great commerce of every civilized society, is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country.1 It consists in the exchange of rude for manufactured produce, either immediately, or by the intervention of money, or of some sort of paper which represents money. The country supplies the town with the means of subsistence, and the materials of manufacture. The town repays this supply by sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which there neither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country. We must not, however, upon this account, imagine that the gain of the town is the loss of the country. The gains of both are mutual and reciprocal, and the division of labour is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous to all the different persons employed in the various occupations into which it is subdivided. The inhabitants of the country purchase of the town a greater quantity of manufactured goods, with the produce of a much smaller quantity of their own labour, than they must have employed had they attempted to prepare them themselves. The town affords a market for the surplus produce of the country, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, and it is there that the inhabitants of the country exchange it for something else which is in demand among them.2 The greater the number and revenue of the inhabitants of the town, the more extensive is the market which it affords to those of the country; and the more extensive that market, it is always the more advantageous to a great number. The corn which grows within a mile of the town, sells there for the same price with that which comes from twenty miles distance. But the price of the latter must generally, not only pay the expence of raising and bringing it to market, but afford too the ordinary profits of agriculture to the farmer.3 The proprietors and cultivators of the country, therefore, which lies in the neighbourhood of the town, over and above the ordinary profits of agriculture, gain, in the price of what they sell, the whole value of the carriage of the like produce that is brought from more distant parts, and they save, besides, the whole value of this carriage in the price of what they buy. Compare the cultivation of the lands in the neighbourhood of any considerable town, with that of those which lie at some distance from it, and you will easily satisfy yourself how much the country is benefited by the commerce of the town. Among all the absurd speculations that have been propagated concerning the balance of trade,4 it has never been pretended that either the country loses by its commerce with the town, or the town by that with the country which maintains it.

2As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, so the industry which procures the former, must necessarily be prior to that which ministers to the latter. The cultivation and improvement of the country, therefore, which affords subsistence, must, necessarily, be prior to the increase of the town, which furnishes only the means of conveniency and luxury. It is the surplus produce of the country only, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, that constitutes the subsistence of the town, which can therefore increase only with the increase of this surplus produce. The town, indeed, may not always derive its whole subsistence from the country in its neighbourhood, or even from the territory to which it belongs, but from very distant countries; and this, though it forms no exception from the general rule, has occasioned considerable variations in the progress of opulence in different ages and nations.

3That order of things which necessity imposes in general, though not in every particular country, is, in every particular country, promoted by the natural inclinations of man. If human institutions had never thwarted those natural inclinations, the towns could no–where have increased beyond what the improvement and cultivation of the territory in which they were situated could support; till such time, at least, as the whole of that territory was compleatly cultivated and improved. Upon equal, or nearly equal profits, most men will chuse to employ their capitals rather in the improvement and cultivation of land, than either in manufactures or in foreign trade. The man who employs his capital in land, has it more under his view and command, and his fortune is much less liable to accidents than that of the trader, who is obliged frequently to commit it, not only to the winds and the waves, but to the more uncertain elements of human folly and injustice, by giving great credits in distant countries to men, with whose character and situation he can seldom be thoroughly acquainted. The capital of the landlord, on the contrary, which is fixed in the improvement of his land, seems to be as well secured as the nature of human affairs can admit of. The beauty of the country besides, the pleasures of a country life, the tranquillity of mind which it promises, and wherever the injustice of human laws does not disturb it, the independency which it really affords, have charms that more or less attract every body; and as to cultivate the ground was the original destination of man, so in every stage of his existence he seems to retain a predilection for this primitive employment.5

4 Without the assistance of some artificers, indeed, the cultivation of land cannot be carried on, but with great inconveniency and continual interruption. Smiths, carpenters, wheel–wrights, and plough–wrights, masons, and bricklayers, tanners, shoemakers, and taylors, are people, whose service the farmer has frequent occasion for. Such artificers too stand, occasionally, in need of the assistance of one another; and as their residence is not, like that of the farmer, necessarily tied down to a precise spot, they naturally settle in the neighbourhood of one another, and thus form a small town or village. The butcher, the brewer, and the baker, soon join them, together with many other artificers and retailers, necessary or useful for supplying their occasional wants, and who contribute still further to augment the town. The inhabitants of the town and those of the country are mutually the servants of one another. The town is a continual fair or market, to which the inhabitants of the country resort, in order to exchange their rude for manufactured produce. It is this commerce which supplies the inhabitants of the town both with the materials of their work, and the means of their subsistence. The quantity of the finished work which they sell to the inhabitants of the country, necessarily regulates the quantity of the materials and provisions which they buy. Neither their employment nor subsistence, therefore, can augment, but in proportion to the augmentation of the demand from the country for finished work; and this demand can augment only in proportion to the extension of improvement and cultivation. Had human institutions, therefore, never disturbed the natural course of things, the progressive wealth and increase of the towns would, in every political society, be consequential, and in proportion to the improvement and cultivation of the territory or country.

5In our North American colonies, where uncultivated land is still to be had upon easy terms, no manufactures for distant sale have ever yet been established in any of their towns.6 When an artificer has acquired a little more stock than is necessary for carrying on his own business in supplying the neighbouring country, he does not, in North America, attempt to establish with it a manufacture for more distant sale, but employs it in the purchase and improvement of uncultivated land.7 From artificer he becomes planter, and neither the large wages nor the easy subsistence which that country affords to artificers, can bribe him rather to work for other people than for himself. He feels that an artificer is the servant of his customers, from whom he derives his subsistence;8 but that a planter who cultivates his own land, and derives his necessary subsistence from the labour of his own family, is really a master, and independent of all the world.

6In countries, on the contrary, where there is either no uncultivated land, or none that can be had upon easy terms, every artificer who has acquired more stock than he can employ in the occasional jobs of the neighbourhood, endeavours to prepare work for more distant sale. The smith erects some sort of iron, the weaver some sort of linen or woollen manufactory. Those different manufactures come, in process of time, to be gradually subdivided, and thereby improved and refined in a great variety of ways, which may easily be conceived, and which it is therefore unnecessary to explain any further.

7In seeking for employment to a capital, manufactures are, upon equal or nearly equal profits, naturally preferred to foreign commerce, for the same reason that agriculture is naturally preferred to manufactures. As the capital of the landlord or farmer is more secure than that of the manufacturer, so the capital of the manufacturer, being at all times more within his view and command, is more secure than that of the foreign merchant. In every period, indeed, of every society, the surplus part both of the rude and manufactured produce, or that for which there is no demand at home, must be sent abroad in order to be exchanged for something for which there is some demand at home. But whether the capital, which carries this surplus produce abroad, be a foreign or a domestick one, is of very little importance. If the society has not acquired sufficient capital both to cultivate all its lands, and to manufacture in the compleatest manner the whole of ^aits^a rude produce, there is even a considerable advantage that ^bthat rude produce^b should be exported by a foreign capital, in order that the whole stock of the society may be employed in more useful purposes. The wealth of antient Egypt, that of China and Indostan, sufficiently demonstrate that a nation may attain a very high degree of opulence, though the greater part of its exportation trade be carried on by foreigners.9 The progress of our North American 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.10

8According to the natural course of things, therefore, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterwards 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.

9But 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.11 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.

CHAPTER II

Of the Discouragement of Agriculture in the antient State of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire1

1When the German and Scythian nations over–ran the western provinces of the Roman empire, the confusions which followed so great a revolution lasted for several centuries.2 The rapine and violence which the barbarians exercised against the antient inhabitants, interrupted the commerce between the towns and the country.3 The towns were deserted, and the country was left uncultivated, and the western provinces of Europe, which had enjoyed a considerable degree of opulence under the Roman empire, sunk into the lowest state of poverty and barbarism. During the continuance of those confusions, the chiefs and principal leaders of those nations, acquired or usurped to themselves the greater part of the lands of those countries. A great part of them was uncultivated; but no part of them, whether cultivated or uncultivated, was left without a proprietor. All of them were engrossed, and the greater part by a few great proprietors.4

2This original engrossing of uncultivated lands, though a great, might have been but a transitory evil. They might soon have been divided again, and broke into small parcels either by succession or by alienation. The law of primogeniture hindered them from being divided by succession: the introduction of entails prevented their being broke into small parcels by alienation.5

3When land, like moveables, is considered as the means only of subsistence and enjoyment, the natural law of succession divides it, like them, among all the children of the family; of all of whom the subsistence and enjoyment may be supposed equally dear to the father. This natural law of succession accordingly took place among the Romans, who made no more distinction between elder and younger, between male and female, in the inheritance of lands, than we do in the distribution of moveables.6 But when land was considered as the means, not of subsistence merely, but of power and protection, it was thought better that it should descend undivided to one. In those disorderly times, every great landlord was a sort of petty prince. His tenants were his subjects. He was their judge, and in some respects their legislator in peace, and their leader in war. He made war according to his own discretion, frequently against his neighbours, and sometimes against his sovereign. The security of a landed estate, therefore, the protection which its owner could afford to those who dwelt on it, depended upon its greatness. To divide it was to ruin it, and to expose every part of it to be oppressed and swallowed up by the incursions of its neighbours.7 The law of primogeniture, therefore, came to take place, not immediately, indeed, but in process of time, in the succession of landed estates, for the same reason that it has generally taken place in that of monarchies, though not always at their first institution. That the power, and consequently the security of the monarchy, may not be weakened by division, it must descend entire to one of the children. To which of them so important a preference shall be given, must be determined by some general rule, founded not upon the doubtful distinctions of personal merit, but upon some plain and evident difference which can admit of no dispute. Among the children of the same family, there can be no indisputable difference but that of sex, and that of age. The male sex is universally preferred to the female; and when all other things are equal, the elder everywhere takes place of the younger. Hence the origin of the right of primogeniture, and of what is called lineal succession.8

4Laws frequently continue in force long after the circumstances, which first gave occasion to them, and which could alone render them reasonable, are no more.9 In the present state of Europe, the proprietor of a single acre of land is as perfectly secure of his possession as the proprietor of a hundred thousand. The right of primogeniture, however, still continues to be respected, and as of all institutions it is the fittest to support the pride of family distinctions, it is still likely to endure for many centuries. In every other respect, nothing can be more contrary to the real interest of a numerous family, than a right which, in order to enrich one, beggars all the rest of the children.

5Entails are the natural consequences of the law of primogeniture. They were introduced to preserve a certain lineal succession, of which the law of primogeniture first gave the idea, and to hinder any part of the original estate from being carried out of the proposed line either by gift, or devise, or alienation; either by the folly, or by the misfortune of any of its successive owners. They were altogether unknown to the Romans.10 Neither their substitutions nor fideicommisses bear any resemblance to entails, though some French lawyers have thought proper to dress the modern institution in the language and ^agarb^a of those antient ones.

6When great landed estates were a sort of principalities, entails might not be unreasonable.11 Like what are called the fundamental laws of some monarchies, they might frequently hinder the security of thousands from being endangered by the caprice or extravagance of one man. But in the present state of Europe, when small as well as great estates derive their security from the laws of their country, nothing can be more completely absurd. They are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago. Entails, however, are still respected through the greater part of Europe, in those countries particularly in which noble birth is a necessary qualification for the enjoyment either of civil or military honours. Entails are thought necessary for maintaining this exclusive privilege of the nobility to the great offices and honours of their country; and that order having usurped one unjust advantage over the rest of their fellow–citizens, lest their poverty should render it ridiculous, it is thought reasonable that they should have another. The common law of England, indeed, is said to abhor perpetuities, and they are accordingly more restricted there than in any other European monarchy; though even England is not altogether without them.12 In Scotland more than one–fifth, perhaps more than one–third part of the whole lands of the country, are at present ^bsupposed to be^b under strict entail.13

7Great tracts of uncultivated land were, in this manner, not only engrossed by particular families, but the possibility of their being divided again was as much as possible precluded for ever. It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.14 In the disorderly times which gave birth to those barbarous institutions, the great proprietor was sufficiently employed in defending his own territories, or in extending his jurisdiction and authority over those of his neighbours. He had no leisure to attend to the cultivation and improvement of land. When the establishment of law and order afforded him this leisure, he often wanted the inclination, and almost always the requisite abilities.15 If the expence of his house and person either equalled or exceeded his revenue, as it did very frequently, he had no stock to employ in this manner. If he was an œconomist, he generally found it more profitable to employ his annual savings in new purchases, than in the improvement of his old estate. To improve land with profit, like all other commercial projects, requires an exact attention to small savings and small gains, of which a man born to a great fortune, even though naturally frugal, is very seldom capable. The situation of such a person naturally disposes him to attend rather to ornament which pleases his fancy, than to profit for which he has so little occasion. The elegance of his dress, of his equipage, of his house, and houshold furniture, are objects which from his infancy he has been accustomed to have some anxiety about. The turn of mind which this habit naturally forms, follows him when he comes to think of the improvement of land. He embellishes perhaps four or five hundred acres in the neighbourhood of his house, at ten times the expence which the land is worth after all his improvements; and finds that if he was to improve his whole estate in the same manner, and he has little taste for any other, he would be a bankrupt before he had finished the tenth part of it.16 There still remain in both parts of the united kingdom some great estates which have continued without interruption in the hands of the same family since the times of feudal anarchy.17 Compare the present condition of those estates with the possessions of the small proprietors in their neighbourhood, and you will require no other argument to convince you how unfavourable such extensive property is to improvement.

8If little improvement was to be expected from such great proprietors, still less was to be hoped for from those who occupied the land under them. In the antient state of Europe, the occupiers of land were all tenants at will.18 They were all or almost all slaves; but their slavery was of a milder kind than that known among the antient Greeks and Romans, or even in our West Indian colonies. They were supposed to belong more directly to the land than to their master. They could, therefore, be sold with it, but not separately. They could marry, provided it was with the consent of their master; and he could not afterwards dissolve the marriage by selling the man and wife to different persons. If he maimed or murdered any of them, he was liable to some penalty, though generally but to a small one. They were not, however, capable of acquiring property.19 Whatever they acquired was acquired to their master, and he could take it from them at pleasure. Whatever cultivation and improvement could be carried on by means of such slaves, was properly carried on by their master. It was at his expence. The seed, the cattle, and the instruments of husbandry were all his. It was for his benefit. Such slaves could acquire nothing but their daily maintenance. It was properly the proprietor himself, therefore, that, in this case, occupied his own lands, and cultivated them by his own bondmen. This species of slavery still subsists in Russia,20 Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and other parts of Germany.21 It is only in the western and southwestern provinces of Europe, that it has gradually been abolished altogether.22

9But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.23 A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. In antient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked by both Pliny and Columella.24 In the time of Aristotle it had not been much better in antient Greece. Speaking of the ideal republick described in the laws of Plato, to maintain five thousand idle men (the number of warriors supposed necessary for its defence) together with their women and servants, would require, he says, a territory of boundless extent and fertility, like the plains of Babylon.25

10The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors.26 Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. The planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expence of slave–cultivation.27 The raising of corn, it seems, in the present times, cannot. In the English colonies, of which the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of the work is done by freemen. The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves, may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great. Had they made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to.28 In our sugar colonies, on the contrary, the whole work is done by slaves, and in our tobacco colonies a very great part of it. The profits of a sugar–plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America: And the profits of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those of corn, as has already been observed.29 Both can afford the expence of slave–cultivation, but sugar can afford it still better than tobacco. The number of negroes accordingly is much greater, in proportion to that of whites, in our sugar than in our tobacco colonies.

11To the slave cultivators of antient times, gradually succeeded a species of farmers known at present in France by the name of Metayers. They are called in Latin, Coloni Partiarii.30 They have been so long in disuse in England that at present I know no English name for them. The proprietor furnished them with the seed, cattle, and instruments of husbandry, the whole stock, in short, necessary for cultivating the farm. The produce was divided equally between the proprietor and the farmer, after setting aside what was judged necessary for keeping up the stock, which was restored to the proprietor when the farmer either quitted, or was turned out of the farm.31

12Land occupied by such tenants is properly cultivated at the expence of the proprietor, as much as that occupied by slaves. There is, however, one very essential difference between them. Such tenants, being freemen, are capable of acquiring property, and having a certain proportion of the produce of the land, they have a plain interest that the whole produce should be as great as possible, in order that their own proportion may be so. A slave, on the contrary, who can acquire nothing but his maintenance, consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible over and above that maintenance. It is probable that it was partly upon account of this advantage, and partly upon account of the encroachments which the sovereign, always jealous of the great lords, gradually encouraged their villains to make upon their authority, and which seem at last to have been such as rendered this species of servitude altogether inconvenient, that tenure in villanage gradually wore out through the greater part of Europe. The time and manner, however, in which so important a revolution was brought about, is one of the most obscure points in modern history. The church of Rome claims great merit in it; and it is certain that so early as the twelfth century, Alexander III. published a bull for the general emancipation of slaves. It seems, however, to have been rather a pious exhortation, than a law to which exact obedience was required from the faithful.32 Slavery continued to take place almost universally for several centuries afterwards, till it was gradually abolished by the joint operation of the two interests above mentioned, that of the proprietor on the one hand, and that of the sovereign on the other.33 A villain enfranchised, and at the same time allowed to continue in possession of the land, having no stock of his own, could cultivate it only by means of what the landlord advanced to him, and must, therefore, have been what the French call a Metayer.

13It could never, however, be the interest even of this last species of cultivators to lay out, in the further improvement of the land, any part of the little stock which they might save from their own share of the produce, because the lord, who laid out nothing, was to get one–half of whatever it produced. The tithe, which is but a tenth of the produce, is found to be a very great hindrance to improvement.34 A tax, therefore, which amounted to one half, must have been an effectual bar to it. It might be the interest of a metayer to make the land produce as much as could be brought out of it by means of the stock furnished by the proprietor; but it could never be his interest to mix any part of his own with it. In France, where five parts out of six of the whole kingdom are said to be still occupied by this species of cultivators,35 the proprietors complain that their metayers take every opportunity of employing the masters cattle rather in carriage than in cultivation; because in the one case they get the whole profits to themselves, in the other they share them with their landlord. This species of tenants still subsists in some parts of Scotland. They are called steel–bow tenants.36 Those antient English tenants, who are said by Chief Baron Gilbert37 and Doctor Blackstone38 to have been rather bailiffs of the landlord than farmers properly so called, were probably of the same kind.

14To this species of tenancy succeeded, though by very slow degrees, farmers properly so called, who cultivated the land with their own stock, paying a rent certain to the landlord.39 When such farmers have a lease for a term of years, they may sometimes find it for their interest to lay out part of their capital in the further improvement of the farm; because they may sometimes expect to recover it, with a large profit, before the expiration of the lease.40 The possession even of such farmers, however, was long extremely precarious, and still is so in many parts of Europe.41 They could before the expiration of their term be legally outed of their lease, by a new purchaser; in England, even by the fictitious action of a common recovery. If they were turned out illegally by the violence of their master, the action by which they obtained redress was extremely imperfect. It did not always re–instate them in the possession of the land, but gave them damages which never amounted to the real loss. Even in England, the country perhaps of Europe where the yeomanry has always been most respected, it was not till about the 14th of Henry the VIIth that the action of ejectment was invented,42 by which the tenant recovers, not damages only but possession, and in which his claim is not necessarily concluded by the uncertain decision of a single assize. This action has been found so effectual a remedy that, in the modern practice, when the landlord has occasion to sue for the possession of the land, he seldom makes use of the actions which properly belong to him as landlord, the writ of right or the writ of entry, but sues in the name of his tenant, by the writ of ejectment. In England, therefore, the security of the tenant is equal to that of the proprietor. In England besides a lease for life of forty shillings a year value is a freehold, and entitles the lessee to vote for a member of parliament; and as a great part of the yeomanry have freeholds of this kind, the whole order becomes respectable to their landlords on account of the political consideration which this gives them.43 There is, I believe, nowhere in Europe, except in England, any instance of the tenant building upon the land of which he had no lease, and trusting that the honour of his landlord would take no advantage of so important an improvement. Those laws and customs so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together.44

15The law which secures the longest leases against successors of every kind is, so far as I know, peculiar to Great Britain. It was introduced into Scotland so early as 1449, by a law of James the IId.45 Its beneficial influence, however, has been much obstructed by entails; the heirs of entail being generally restrained from letting leases for any long term of years, frequently for more than one year. A late act of parliament has,46 in this respect, somewhat slackened their fetters, though they are still by much too strait. In Scotland, besides, as no leasehold gives a vote for a member of parliament, the yeomanry are upon this account less respectable to their landlords than in England.47

16In other parts of Europe, after it was found convenient to secure tenants both against heirs and purchasers, the term of their security was still limited to a very short period; in France, for example, to nine years from the commencement of the lease. It has in that country, indeed, been lately extended to twenty–seven,48 a period still too short to encourage the tenant to make the most important improvements. The proprietors of land were antiently the legislators of every part of Europe. The laws relating to land, therefore, were all calculated for what they supposed the interest of the proprietor. It was for his interest, they had imagined, that no lease granted by any of his predecessors should hinder him from enjoying, during a long term of years, the full value of his land. Avarice and injustice are always short–sighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long–run the real interest of the landlord.

17The farmers too, besides paying the rent, were antiently, it was supposed, bound to perform a great number of services to the landlord, which were seldom either specified in the lease, or regulated by any precise rule, but by the use and wont of the manor or barony. These services, therefore, being almost entirely arbitrary, subjected the tenant to many vexations. In Scotland the abolition of all services, not precisely stipulated in the lease,49 has in the course of a few years very much altered for the better the condition of the yeomanry of that country.

18The public services to which the yeomanry were bound, were not less arbitrary than the private ones. To make and maintain the high roads,50 a servitude which still subsists,51 I believe, every where, though with different degrees of oppression in different countries, was not the only one. When the king’s troops, when his household or his officers of any kind passed through any part of the country, the yeomanry were bound to provide them with horses, carriages, and provisions, at a price regulated by the purveyor. Great Britain is, I believe, the only monarchy in Europe where the oppression of purveyance has been entirely abolished. It still subsists in France and Germany.

19The publick taxes to which they were subject were as irregular and oppressive as the services. The antient lords, though extremely unwilling to grant themselves any pecuniary aid to their sovereign, easily allowed him to tallage,52 as they called it, their tenants, and had not knowledge enough to foresee how much this must in the end affect their own revenue.53 The taille, as it still subsists in France, may serve as an example of those antient tallages. It is a tax upon the supposed profits of the farmer, which they estimate by the stock that he has upon the farm. It is his interest, therefore, to appear to have as little as possible, and consequently to employ as little as possible in its cultivation, and none in its improvement. Should any stock happen to accumulate in the hands of a French farmer, the taille is almost equal to a prohibition of its ever being employed upon the land.54 This tax besides is supposed to dishonour whoever is subject to it, and to degrade him below, not only the rank of a gentleman, but that of a burgher, and whoever rents the lands of another becomes subject to it. No gentleman, nor even any burgher ^cwho^c has stock, will submit to this degradation. This tax, therefore, not only hinders the stock which accumulates upon the land from being employed in its improvement, but drives away all other stock from it. The antient tenths and fifteenths,55 so usual in England in former times, seem, so far as they affected the land, to have been taxes of the same nature with the taille.

20Under all these discouragements, little improvement could be expected from the occupiers of land. That order of people, with all the liberty and security which law can give, must always improve under great disadvantages. The farmer compared with the proprietor, is as a merchant who trades with borrowed money compared with one who trades with his own. The stock of both may improve, but that of the one, with only equal good conduct, must always improve more slowly than that of the other, on account of the large share of the profits which is consumed by the interest of the loan. The lands cultivated by the farmer must, in the same manner, with only equal good conduct, be improved more slowly than those cultivated by the proprietor; on account of the large share of the produce which is consumed in the rent,56 and which, had the farmer been proprietor, he might have employed in the further improvement of the land.57 The station of a farmer besides is, from the nature of things, inferior to that of a proprietor. Through the greater part of Europe the yeomanry are regarded as an inferior rank of people, even to the better sort of tradesmen and mechanicks, and in all parts of Europe to the great merchants and master manufacturers. It can seldom happen, therefore, that a man of any considerable stock should quit the superior, in order to place himself in an inferior station. Even in the present state of Europe, therefore, little stock is likely to go from any other profession to the improvement of land in the way of farming. More does perhaps in Great Britain than in any other country, though even there the great stocks which are, in some places, employed in farming, have generally been acquired by farming, the trade, perhaps, in which of all others stock is commonly acquired most slowly. After small proprietors, however, rich and great farmers are, in every country, the principal improvers. There are more such perhaps in England than in any other European monarchy. In the republican governments of Holland and of Berne in Switzerland, the farmers are said to be not inferior to those of England.58

21The antient policy of Europe was, over and above all this, unfavourable to the improvement and cultivation of land, whether carried on by the proprietor or by the farmer; first, by the general prohibition of the exportation of corn without a special licence, which seems to have been a very universal regulation;59 and secondly, by the restraints which were laid upon the inland commerce, not only of corn but of almost every other part of the produce of the farm, by the absurd laws against engrossers, regrators, and forestallers, and by the privileges of fairs and markets.60 It has already been observed in what manner the prohibition of the exportation of corn, together with some encouragement given to the importation of foreign corn, obstructed the cultivation of antient Italy, naturally the most fertile country in Europe, and at that time the seat of the greatest empire in the world.61 To what degree such restraints upon the inland commerce of this commodity, joined to the general prohibition of exportation, must have discouraged the cultivation of countries less fertile, and less favourably circumstanced, it is not perhaps very easy to imagine.

CHAPTER III

Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns, after the Fall of the Roman Empire

1The inhabitants of cities and towns were, after the fall of the Roman empire, not more favoured than those of the country. They consisted, indeed, of a very different order of people from the first inhabitants of the antient republicks of Greece and Italy. These last were composed chiefly of the proprietors of lands, among whom the publick territory was originally divided, and who found it convenient to build their houses in the neighbourhood of one another, and to surround them with a wall, for the sake of common defence.1 After the fall of the Roman empire, on the contrary, the proprietors of land seem generally to have lived in fortified castles on their own estates, and in the midst of their own tenants and dependants. The towns were chiefly inhabited by tradesmen and mechanicks, who seem in those days to have been of servile, or very nearly of servile condition. The privileges which we find granted by antient charters to the inhabitants of some of the principal towns in Europe, sufficiently shew what they were before those grants.2 The people to whom it is granted as a privilege, that they might give away their own daughters in marriage without the consent of their lord, that upon their death their own children, and not their lord, should succeed to their goods, and that they might dispose of their own effects by will, must, before those grants, have been either altogether, or very nearly in the same state of villanage with the occupiers of land in the country.

2They seem, indeed, to have been a very poor, mean sett of people, who used to travel about with their goods from place to place, and from fair to fair, like the hawkers and pedlars of the present times.3 In all the different countries of Europe then, in the same manner as in several of the Tartar governments of Asia at present, taxes used to be levied upon the persons and goods of travellers, when they passed through certain manors, when they went over certain bridges, when they carried about their goods from place to place in a fair, when they erected in it a booth or stall to sell them in. These different taxes were known in England by the names of passage, pontage, lastage, and stallage.4 Sometimes the king, sometimes a great lord, who had, it seems, upon some occasions, authority to do this, would grant to particular traders, to such particularly as lived in their own demesnes, a general exemption from such taxes. Such traders, though in other respects of servile, or very nearly of servile condition, were upon this account called Free–traders.5 They in return usually paid to their protector a sort of annual poll–tax. In those days protection was seldom granted without a valuable consideration, and this tax might, perhaps, be considered as compensation for what their patrons might lose by their exemption from other taxes. At first, both those poll–taxes and those exemptions seem to have been altogether personal, and to have affected only particular individuals, during either their lives, or the pleasure of their protectors. In the very imperfect accounts which have been published from Domesdaybook, of several of the towns of England, mention is frequently made, sometimes of the tax which particular burghers paid, each of them, either to the king, or to some other great lord, for this sort of protection;6 and sometimes of the general amount only of all those taxes* .

3 But how servile soever may have been originally the condition of the inhabitants of ^bthe^b towns, it appears evidently, that they arrived at liberty and independency much earlier than the occupiers of land in the country. That part of the king’s revenue which arose from such poll–taxes in any particular town, used commonly to be lett in farm, during a term of years for a rent certain, sometimes to the sheriff of the county, and sometimes to other persons. The burghers themselves frequently got credit enough to be admitted to farm the revenues of this sort which arose out of their own town, they becoming jointly and severally answerable for the whole rent* . To lett a farm in this manner was quite agreeable to the usual œconomy of, I believe, the sovereigns of all the different countries of Europe;7 who used frequently to lett whole manors to all the tenants of those manors, they becoming jointly and severally answerable for the whole rent; but in return being allowed to collect it in their own way, and to pay it into the king’s exchequer by the hands of their own bailiff, and being thus altogether freed from the insolence of the king’s officers; a circumstance in those days regarded as of the greatest importance.8

4At first, the farm of the town was probably lett to the burghers, in the same manner as it had been to other farmers, for a term of years only. In process of time, however, it seems to have become the general practice to grant it to them in fee, that is for ever, reserving a rent certain never afterwards to be augmented. The payment having thus become perpetual, the exemptions, in return for which it was made, naturally became perpetual too. Those exemptions, therefore, ceased to be personal, and could not afterwards be considered as belonging to individuals as individuals, but as burghers of a particular burgh, which, upon this account, was called a Free–burgh, for the same reason that they had been called Free–burghers or Free–traders.9

5Along with this grant, the important privileges above mentioned, that they might give away their own daughters in marriage, that their children should succeed to them, and that they might dispose of their own effects by will, were generally bestowed upon the burghers of the town to whom it was given. Whether such privileges had before been usually granted along with the freedom of trade, to particular burghers, as individuals, I know not. I reckon it not improbable that they were, though I cannot produce any direct evidence of it. But however this may have been, the principal attributes of villanage and slavery being thus taken away from them, they now, at least, became really free in our present sense of the word Freedom.

6Nor was this all. They were generally at the same time erected into a commonality or corporation,10 with the privilege of having magistrates and a town–council of their own, of making bye–laws for their own government, of building walls for their own defence, and of reducing all their inhabitants under a sort of military discipline, by obliging them to watch and ward; that is, as antiently understood, to guard and defend those walls against all attacks and surprises by night as well as by day.11 In England they were generally exempted from suit to the hundred and county courts; and all such pleas as should arise among them, the pleas of the crown excepted, were left to the decision of their own magistrates. In other countries much greater and more extensive jurisdictions were frequently granted to them* .

7It might, probably, be necessary to grant to such towns as were admitted to farm their own revenues, some sort of compulsive jurisdiction to oblige their own citizens to make payment. In those disorderly times it might have been extremely inconvenient to have left them to seek this sort of justice from any other tribunal. But it must seem extraordinary that the sovereigns of all the different countries of Europe, should have exchanged in this manner for a rent certain, never more to be augmented, that branch of their revenue, which was, perhaps, of all others the most likely to be improved by the natural course of things, without–either expence or attention of their own: and that they should, besides, have in this manner voluntarily erected a sort of independent republicks in the heart of their own dominions.12

8In order to understand this, it must be remembered, that in those days the sovereign of perhaps no country in Europe, was able to protect, through the whole extent of his dominions, the weaker part of his subjects from the oppression of the great lords.13 Those whom the law could not protect, and who were not strong enough to defend themselves, were obliged either to have recourse to the protection of some great lord, and in order to obtain it to become either his slaves or vassals; or to enter into a league of mutual defence for the common protection of one another. The inhabitants of cities and burghs, considered as single individuals, had no power to defend themselves: but by entering into a league of mutual defence with their neighbours, they were capable of making no contemptible resistance. The lords despised the burghers, whom they considered not only as of a different order, but as a parcel of emancipated slaves, almost of a different species from themselves.14 The wealth of the burghers never failed to provoke their envy and indignation, and they plundered them upon every occasion without mercy or remorse. The burghers naturally hated and feared the lords. The king hated and feared them too; but though perhaps he might despise, he had no reason either to hate or fear the burghers.15 Mutual interest, therefore, disposed them to support the king, and the king to support them against the lords. They were the enemies of his enemies, and it was his interest to render them as secure and independent of those enemies as he could. By granting them magistrates of their own, the privilege of making bye–laws for their own government, that of building walls for their own defence, and that of reducing all their inhabitants under a sort of military discipline, he gave them all the means of security and independency of the barons which it was in his power to bestow. Without the establishment of some regular government of this kind, without some authority to compel their inhabitants to act according to some certain plan or system, no voluntary league of mutual defence could either have afforded them any permanent security, or have enabled them to give the king any considerable support. By granting them the farm of their town in fee, he took away from those whom he wished to have for his friends, and, if one may say so, for his allies, all ground of jealousy and suspicion that he was ever afterwards to oppress them, either by raising the farm rent of their town, or by granting it to some other farmer.

9The princes who lived upon the worst terms with their barons, seem accordingly to have been the most liberal in grants of this kind to their burghs. King John of England,16 for example, appears to have been a most munificent benefactor to his towns* . Philip the First of France lost all authority over his barons. Towards the end of his reign, his son Lewis, known afterwards by the name of Lewis the Fat, consulted, according to Father Daniel,17 with the bishops of the royal demesnes, concerning the most proper means of restraining the violence of the great lords. Their advice consisted of two different proposals. One was to erect a new order of jurisdiction, by establishing magistrates and a town council in every considerable town of his demesnes. The other was to form a new militia, by making the inhabitants of those towns, under the command of their own magistrates, march out upon proper occasions to the assistance of the king. It is from this period, according to the French antiquarians, that we are to date the institution of the magistrates and councils of cities in France.18 It was during the unprosperous reigns of the princes of the house of Suabia that the greater part of the free towns of Germany received the first grants of their privileges, and that the famous Hanseatic19 league first became formidable* .

10The militia of the cities seems, in those times, not to have been inferior to that of the country, and as they could be more readily assembled upon any sudden occasion, they frequently had the advantage in their disputes with the neighbouring lords. In countries, such as Italy and Switzerland, in which, on account either of their distance from the principal seat of government, of the natural strength of the country itself, or of some other reason, the sovereign came to lose the whole of his authority, the cities generally became independent republicks, and conquered all the nobility in their neighbourhood; obliging them to pull down their castles in the country, and to live, like other peaceable inhabitants, in the city.20 This is the short history of the republick of Berne, as well as of several other cities in Switzerland. If you except Venice, for of that city the history is somewhat different, it is the history of all the considerable Italian republicks, of which so great a number arose and perished, between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.

11In countries such as France or England, where the authority of the sovereign, though frequently very low, never was destroyed altogether, the cities had no opportunity of becoming entirely independent.21 They became, however, so considerable that the sovereign could impose no tax upon them, besides the stated farm–rent of the town, without their own consent. They were, therefore, called upon to send deputies to the general assembly of the states of the kingdom, where they might join with the clergy and the barons in granting, upon urgent occasions, some extraordinary aid to the king. Being generally too more favourable to his power, their deputies seem, sometimes, to have been employed by him as a counterbalance ^gin those assemblies^g to the authority of the great lords^h . Hence the origin of the representation of burghs in the states general of all the great monarchies in Europe.22

12Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were, in this manner, established in cities at a time when the occupiers of land in the country were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because to acquire more might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition,23 and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life.24 That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. If in the hands of a poor cultivator, oppressed with the servitude of villanage, some little stock should accumulate, he would naturally conceal it with great care from his master, to whom it would otherwise have belonged, and take the first opportunity of running away to a town. The law was at that time so indulgent to the inhabitants of towns, and so desirous of diminishing the authority of the lords over those of the country, that if he could conceal himself there from the pursuit of his lord for a year, he was free for ever.25 Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.

13The inhabitants of a city, it is true, must always ultimately derive their subsistence, and the whole materials and means of their industry from the country. But those of a city, situated near either the sea–coast or the banks of a navigable river, are not necessarily confined to derive them from the country in their neighbourhood.26 They have a much wider range, and may draw them from the most remote corners of the world, either in exchange for the manufactured produce of their own industry, or by performing the office of carriers between distant countries, and exchanging the produce of one for that of another.27 A city might in this manner grow up to great wealth and splendor, while not only the country in its neighbourhood, but all those to which it traded, were in poverty and wretchedness.28 Each of those countries, perhaps, taken singly, could afford it but a small part, either of its subsistence, or of its employment; but all of them taken together could afford it both a great subsistence and a great employment. There were, however, within the narrow circle of the commerce of those times, some countries that were opulent and industrious. Such was the Greek empire as long as it subsisted, and that of the Saracens during the reigns of the Abassides. Such too was Egypt till it was conquered by the Turks, some part of the coast of Barbary, and all those provinces of Spain which were under the government of the Moors.29

14 The cities of Italy seem to have been the first in Europe which were raised by commerce to any considerable degree of opulence. Italy lay in the center of what was at that time the improved and civilized part of the world.30 The cruzades too, though by the great waste of stock and destruction of inhabitants which they occasioned, they must necessarily have retarded the progress of the greater part of Europe, were extremely favourable to that of some Italian cities. The great armies which marched from all parts to the conquest of the Holy Land, gave extraordinary encouragement to the shipping of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa,31 sometimes in transporting them thither, and always in supplying them with provisions. They were the commissaries, if one may say so, of those armies; and the most destructive frenzy that ever befel the European nations, was a source of opulence to those republicks.32

15The inhabitants of trading cities, by importing the improved manufactures and expensive luxuries of richer countries, afforded some food to the vanity of the great proprietors, who eagerly purchased them with great quantities of the rude produce of their own lands. The commerce of a great part of Europe in those times accordingly, consisted chiefly in the exchange of their own rude, for the manufactured produce of more civilized nations. Thus the wool of England used to be exchanged for the wines of France, and the fine cloths of Flanders, in the same manner as the corn ⁱofⁱ Poland is at this day exchanged for the wines and brandies of France, and for the silks and velvets of France and Italy.

16A taste for the finer and more improved manufactures, was in this manner introduced by foreign commerce into countries where no such works were carried on. But when this taste became so general as to occasion a considerable demand, the merchants, in order to save the expence of carriage, naturally endeavoured to establish some manufactures of the same kind in their own country. Hence the origin of the first manufactures for distant sale that seem to have been established in the western provinces of Europe, after the fall of the Roman empire.

17No large country, it must be observed, ever did or could subsist without some sort of manufactures being carried on in it; and when it is said of any such country that it has no manufactures, it must always be understood of the finer and more improved, or of such as are fit for distant sale. In every large country, both the cloathing and houshold furniture of the far greater part of the people, are the produce of their own industry. This is even more universally the case in those poor countries which are commonly said to have no manufactures, than in those rich ones that are said to abound in them. In the latter, you will generally find, both in the cloaths and houshold furniture of the lowest rank of people, a much greater proportion of foreign productions than in the former.

18 Those manufactures which are fit for distant sale, seem to have been introduced into different countries in two different ways.

19Sometimes they have been introduced, in the manner above mentioned, by the violent operation, if one may say so, of the stocks of particular merchants and undertakers, who established them in imitation of some foreign manufactures of the same kind. Such manufactures, therefore, are the offspring of foreign commerce, and such seem to have been the antient manufactures of silks, velvets, and brocades^j, which flourished in Lucca during^j the thirteenth century. ^kThey were banished from thence by the tyranny of one of Machiavel’s heroes, Castruccio Castracani. In 1310, nine hundred families were driven out of Lucca , of whom thirty–one retired to Venice, and offered to introduce there the silk manufacture* . Their offer was accepted; many privileges were conferred upon them, and they began the manufacture with three hundred workmen.^k Such too seem to have been the manufactures of fine cloths that antiently flourished in Flanders, and which were introduced into England in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth; and such are the present silk manufactures of Lyons and Spitalfields.33 Manufactures introduced in this manner are generally employed upon foreign materials, being ^m imitations of foreign manufactures. When the Venetian manufacture ⁿwas first established the materials were all brought from Sicily and the Levant. The more antient manufacture of Lucca was likewise carried on with foreign materials. The cultivation of mulberry trees, and the breeding of silk worms, seem not to have been common in the northern parts of Italy before the sixteenth century. Those arts were not introduced into France till the reign of Charles IX.ⁿ The manufactures of Flanders were carried on chiefly with Spanish and English wool. Spanish wool was the material, not of the first woollen manufacture of England, but of the first that was fit for distant sale.34 More than one half the materials of the Lyons manufacture is at this day foreign silk; when it was first established, the whole or very nearly the whole was so. No part of the materials of the Spital–fields manufacture is ever likely to be the produce of England. The seat of such manufactures, as they are generally introduced by the scheme and project of a few individuals, is sometimes established in a maritime city, and sometimes in an inland town, according as their interest, judgment or caprice happen to determine.

20At other times manufactures for distant sale grow up naturally, and as it were of their own accord, by the gradual refinement of those houshold and coarser manufactures which must at all times be carried on even in the poorest and rudest countries.35 Such manufactures are generally employed upon the materials which the country produces, and they seem frequently to have been first refined and improved in such inland countries as were, not indeed at a very great, but at a considerable distance from the sea coast, and sometimes even from all water carriage. An inland country naturally fertile and easily cultivated, produces a great surplus of provisions beyond what is necessary for maintaining the cultivators, and on account of the expence of land carriage, and inconveniency of river navigation, it may frequently be difficult to send this surplus abroad. Abundance, therefore, renders provisions cheap, and encourages a great number of workmen to settle in the neighbourhood, who find that their industry can there procure them more of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than in other places.36 They work up the materials of manufacture which the land produces, and exchange their finished work, or what is the same thing the price of it, for more materials and provisions. They give a new value to the surplus part of the rude produce, by saving the expence of carrying it to the water side, or to some distant market; and they furnish the cultivators with something in exchange for it that is either useful or agreeable to them, upon easier terms than they could have obtained it before. The cultivators get a better price for their surplus produce, and can purchase cheaper other conveniencies which they have occasion for. They are thus both encouraged and enabled to increase this surplus produce by a further improvement and better cultivation of the land; and as the fertility of the land had given birth to the manufacture, so the progress of the manufacture re–acts upon the land, and increases still further its fertility. The manufacturers first supply the neighbourhood, and afterwards, as their work improves and refines, more distant markets. For though neither the rude produce, nor even the coarse manufacture, could, without the greatest difficulty, support the expence of a considerable land carriage, the refined and improved manufacture easily may. In a small bulk it frequently contains the price of a great quantity of rude produce. A piece of fine cloth, for example, which weighs only eighty pounds, contains in it, the price, not only of eighty pounds weight of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the maintenance of the different working people, and of their immediate employers. The corn, which could with difficulty have been carried abroad in its own shape, is in this manner virtually exported in that of the complete manufacture, and may easily be sent to the remotest corners of the world.37 In this manner have grown up naturally, and as it were of their own accord, the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton. Such manufactures are the offspring of agriculture.38 In the modern history of Europe, their extension and improvement have generally been posterior to those which were the offspring of foreign commerce.39 England was noted for the manufacture of fine cloths made of Spanish wool, more than a century before any of those which now flourish in the places above mentioned were fit for foreign sale. The extension and improvement of these last could not take place but in consequence of the extension and improvement of agriculture, the last and greatest effect of foreign commerce, and of the manufactures immediately introduced by it, and which I shall now proceed to explain.

CHAPTER IV

How the Commerce of the Towns contributed to the Improvement of the Country

1The increase and riches of commercial and manufacturing towns, contributed to the improvement and cultivation of the countries to which they belonged, in three different ways.

2First, by affording a great and ready market for the rude produce of the country, they gave encouragement to its cultivation and further improvement. This benefit was not even confined to the countries in which they were situated, but extended more or less to all those with which they had any dealings. To all of them they afforded a market for some part either of their rude or manufactured produce, and consequently gave some encouragement to the industry and improvement of all. Their own country, however, on account of its neighbourhood, necessarily derived the greatest benefit from this market. Its rude produce being charged with less carriage, the traders could pay the growers a better price for it, and yet afford it as cheap to the consumers as that of more distant countries.

3Secondly, the wealth acquired by the inhabitants of cities was frequently employed in purchasing such lands as were to be sold, of which a great part would frequently be uncultivated.1 Merchants are commonly ambitious of becoming country gentlemen, and when they do, they are generally the best of all improvers.2 A merchant is accustomed to employ his money chiefly in profitable projects; whereas a mere country gentleman is accustomed to employ it chiefly in expence. The one often sees his money go from him and return to him again with a profit: the other, when once he parts with it, very seldom expects to see any more of it. Those different habits naturally affect their temper and disposition in every sort of business. A merchant is commonly a bold; a country gentleman, a timid undertaker. The one is not afraid to lay out at once a large capital upon the improvement of his land, when he has a probable prospect of raising the value of it in proportion to the expence. The other, if he has any capital, which is not always the case, seldom ventures to employ it in this manner. If he improves at all, it is commonly not with a capital, but with what he can save out of his annual revenue. Whoever has had the fortune to live in a mercantile town situated in an unimproved country, must have frequently observed how much more spirited the operations of merchants were in this way, than those of mere country gentlemen. The habits, besides, of order, œconomy and attention, to which mercantile business naturally forms a merchant, render him much fitter to execute, with profit and success, any project of improvement.3

4Thirdly, and lastly, commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government,4 and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.5 This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. Mr. Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.6

5In a country which has neither foreign commerce, nor any of the finer manufactures, a great proprietor, having nothing for which he can exchange the greater part of the produce of his lands which is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, consumes the whole in rustick hospitality at home.7 If this surplus produce is sufficient to maintain a hundred or a thousand men, he can make use of it in no other way than by maintaining a hundred or a thousand men. He is at all times, therefore, surrounded with a multitude of retainers and dependants, who having no equivalent to give in return for their maintenance, but being fed entirely by his bounty, must obey him, for the same reason that soldiers must obey the prince who pays them. Therefore the extension of commerce and manufactures in Europe, the hospitality of the rich and the great, from the sovereign down to the smallest baron, exceeded every thing which in the present times we can easily form a notion of. Westminster–hall was the dining–room of William Rufus, and might frequently, perhaps, not be too large for his company.8 It was reckoned a piece of magnificence in Thomas Becket, that he strowed the floor of his hall with clean hay or rushes in the season, in order that the knights and squires, who could not get seats, might not spoil their fine cloaths when they sat down on the floor to eat their dinner.9 The great earl of Warwick is said to have entertained every day at his different manors, thirty thousand people; and though the number here may have been exaggerated, it must, however, have been very great to admit of such exaggeration.10 A hospitality nearly of the same kind was exercised not many years ago in many different parts of the highlands of Scotland. It seems to be common in all nations to whom commerce and manufactures are little known. I have seen, says Doctor Pocock,11 an Arabian chief dine in the streets of a town where he had come to sell his cattle, and invite all passengers, even common beggars, to sit down with him and partake of his banquet.12

6The occupiers of land were in every respect as dependent upon the great proprietor as his retainers.13 Even such of them as were not in a state of villange, were tenants at will, who paid a rent in no respect equivalent to the subsistence which the land afforded them.14 A crown, half a crown, a sheep, a lamb, was some years ago in the highlands of Scotland a common rent for lands which maintained a family. In some places it is so at this day; nor will money at present purchase a greater quantity of commodities there than in other places. In a country where the surplus produce of a large estate must be consumed upon the estate itself, it will frequently be more convenient for the proprietor, that part of it be consumed at a distance from his own house, provided they who consume it are as dependent upon him as either his retainers or his menial servants. He is thereby saved from the embarrassment of either too large a company or too large a family. A tenant at will, who possesses land sufficient to maintain his family for little more than a quit–rent, is as dependent upon the proprietor as any servant or retainer whatever, and must obey him with as little reserve. Such a proprietor, as he feeds his servants and retainers at his own house, so he feeds his tenants at their houses. The subsistence of both is derived from his bounty, and its continuance depends upon his good pleasure.

7Upon the authority which the great proprietors necessarily had in such a state of things over their tenants and retainers, was founded the power of the antient barons.15 They necessarily became the judges in peace, and the leaders in war, of all who dwelt upon their estates.16 They could maintain order and execute the law within their respective demesnes, because each of them could there turn the whole force of all the inhabitants against the injustice of any one. No other person had sufficient authority to do this. The king in particular had not.17 In those antient times he was little more than the greatest proprietor in his dominions, to whom, for the sake of common defence against their common enemies, the other great proprietors paid certain respects. To have enforced payment of a small debt within the lands of a great proprietor, where all the inhabitants were armed and accustomed to stand by one another, would have cost the king, had he attempted it by his own authority, almost the same effort as to extinguish a civil war.18 He was, therefore, obliged to abandon the administration of justice through the greater part of the country, to those who were capable of administering it; and for the same reason to leave the command of the country militia to those whom that militia would obey.

8It is a mistake to imagine that those territorial jurisdictions took their origin from the feudal law. Not only the highest jurisdictions both civil and criminal, but the power of levying troops, of coining money, and even that of making bye–laws for the government of their own people, were all rights possessed allodially by the great proprietors of land several centuries before even the name of the feudal law was known in Europe. The authority and jurisdiction of the Saxon lords in England, ^aappear^a to have been as great before the conquest,19 as that of any of the Norman lords after it. But the feudal law is not supposed to have become the common law of England till after the conquest.20 That the most extensive authority and jurisdictions were possessed by the great lords in France allodially, long before the feudal law was introduced into that country, is a matter of fact that admits of no doubt.21 That authority and those jurisdictions all necessarily flowed from the state of property and manners just now described.22 Without remounting to the remote antiquities of either the French or English monarchies, we may find in much later times many proofs that such effects must always flow from such causes. It is not thirty years ago since Mr. Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochabar in Scotland, without any legal warrant whatever, not being what was then called a lord of regality, nor even a tenant in chief, but a vassal of the duke of Argyle, and without being so much as a justice of peace, used, notwithstanding, to exercise the highest criminal jurisdiction over his own people. He is said to have done so with great equity, though without any of the formalities of justice; and it is not improbable that the state of that part of the country at that time made it necessary for him to assume this authority in order to maintain the publick peace.23 That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with him.24

9 The introduction of the feudal law, so far from extending, may be regarded as an attempt to moderate the authority of the great allodial lords.25 It established a regular subordination, accompanied with a long train of services and duties, from the king down to the smallest proprietor. During the minority of the proprietor, the rent, together with the management of his lands, fell into the hands of his immediate superior, and, consequently, those of all great proprietors into the hands of the king, who was charged with the maintenance and education of the pupil, and who, from his authority as guardian, was supposed to have a right of disposing of him in marriage, provided it was in a manner not unsuitable to his rank.26 But though this institution necessarily tended to strengthen the authority of the king, and to weaken that of the great proprietors, it could not do either sufficiently for establishing order and good government among the inhabitants of the country; because it could not alter sufficiently that state of property and manners from which the disorders arose. The authority of government still continued to be, as before, too weak in the head and too strong in the inferior members, and the excessive strength of the inferior members was the cause of the weakness of the head. After the institution of feudal subordination, the king was as incapable of restraining the violence of the great lords as before. They still continued to make war according to their own discretion, almost continually upon one another, and very frequently upon the king; and the open country still continued to be a scene of violence, rapine, and disorder.27

10But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.28 These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers.29 All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.30 For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them.31 The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more antient method of expence they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference, this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.32

11In a country where there is no foreign commerce, nor any of the finer manufactures, a man of ten thousand a year cannot well employ his revenue in any other way than in maintaining, perhaps, a thousand families, who are all of them necessarily at his command.33 In the present state of Europe, a man of ten thousand a year can spend his whole revenue, and he generally does so, without directly maintaining twenty people, or being able to command more than ten footmen not worth the commanding.34 Indirectly, perhaps, he maintains as great or even a greater number of people than he could have done by the antient method of expence. For though the quantity of precious productions for which he exchanges his whole revenue be very small, the number of workmen employed in collecting and preparing it, must necessarily have been very great. Its great price generally arises from the wages of their labour, and the profits of all their immediate employers. By paying that price he indirectly pays all those wages and profits, and thus indirectly contributes to the maintenance of all the workmen and their employers.35 He generally contributes, however, but a very small proportion to that of each, to very few perhaps a tenth, to many not a hundredth, and to some not a thousandth, nor even a ten thousandth part of their whole annual maintenance. Though he contributes, therefore, to the maintenance of them all, they are all more or less independent of him, because generally they can all be maintained without him.36

12When the great proprietors of land spend their rents in maintaining their tenants and retainers, each of them maintains entirely all his own tenants and all his own retainers. But when they spend them in maintaining tradesmen and artificers, they may, all of them taken together, perhaps, maintain as great, or, on account of the waste which attends rustick hospitality, a greater number of people than before. Each of them, however, taken singly, contributes often but a very small share to the maintenance of any individual of this greater number. Each tradesman or artificer derives his subsistence from the employment, not of one, but of a hundred or a thousand different customers. Though in some measure obliged to them all, therefore, he is not absolutely dependent upon any one of them.

13The personal expence of the great proprietors having in this manner gradually increased, it was impossible that the number of their retainers should not as gradually diminish, till they were at last dismissed altogether. The same cause gradually led them to dismiss the unnecessary part of their tenants. Farms were enlarged, and the occupiers of land, notwithstanding the complaints of depopulation, reduced to the number necessary for cultivating it, according to the imperfect state of cultivation and improvement in those times. By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by exacting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor, which the merchants and manufacturers soon furnished him with a method of spending upon his own person in the same manner as he had done the rest. The same cause continuing to operate, he was desirous to raise his rents above what his lands, in the actual state of their improvement, could afford. His tenants could agree to this upon one condition only, that they should be secured in their possession, for such a term of years as might give them time to recover with profit whatever they should lay out in the further improvement of the land. The expensive vanity of the landlord made him willing to accept of this condition; and hence the origin of long leases.37

14Even a tenant at will, who pays the full value of the land, is not altogether dependent upon the landlord. The pecuniary advantages which they receive from one another, are mutual and equal, and such a tenant will expose neither his life nor his fortune in the service of the proprietor. But if he has a lease for a long term of years, he is altogether independent; and his landlord must not expect from him even the most trifling service beyond what is either expressly stipulated in the lease, or imposed upon him by the common and known law of the country.

15The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice, or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birth–right, not like Esau for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the play–things of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesman in a city. A regular government was established in the country as well as in the city, nobody having sufficient power to disturb its operations in the one, any more than in the other.38

16It does not, perhaps, relate to the present subject, but I cannot help remarking it, that very old families, such as have possessed some considerable estate from father to son for many successive generations, are very rare in commercial countries. In countries which have little commerce, on the contrary, such as Wales or the highlands of Scotland, they are very common.39 The Arabian histories seem to be all full of genealogies, and there is a history written by a Tartar Khan, which has been translated into several European languages, and which contains scarce any thing else;40 a proof that antient families are very common among those nations. In countries where a rich man can spend his revenue in no other way than by maintaining as many people as it can maintain, he is not apt to run out, and his benevolence it seems is seldom so violent as to attempt to maintain more than he can afford. But where he can spend the greatest revenue upon his own person, he frequently has no bounds to his expence, because he frequently has no bounds to his vanity, or to his affection for his own person. In commercial countries, therefore, riches, in spite of the most violent regulations of law to prevent their dissipation, very seldom remain long in the same family. Among simple nations, on the contrary, they frequently do without any regulations of law; for among nations of shepherds, such as the Tartars and Arabs, the consumable nature of their property necessarily renders all such regulations impossible.

17A revolution of the greatest importance to the publick happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the publick. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.41

18It is thus that through the greater part of Europe the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.

19This order, however, being contrary to the natural course of things, is necessarily both slow and uncertain. Compare the slow progress of those European countries of which the wealth depends very much upon their commerce and manufactures, with the rapid advances of our North American colonies, of which the wealth is founded altogether in agriculture.42 Through the greater part of Europe, the number of inhabitants is not supposed to double in less than five hundred years. In several of our North American colonies, it is found to double in twenty or five–and–twenty years.43 In Europe, the law of primogeniture, and perpetuities of different kinds, prevent the division of great estates, and thereby hinder the multiplication of small proprietors.44 A small proprietor, however, who knows every part of his little territory, ^bwho^b views it ^cwith all^c the affection which property, especially small property, naturally inspires, and who upon that account takes pleasure not only in cultivating but in adorning it, is generally of all improvers the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful.45 The same regulations, besides, keep so much land out of the market, that there are always more capitals to buy than there is land to sell, so that what is sold always sells at a monopoly price. The rent never pays the interest of the purchase–money, and is besides burdened with repairs and other occasional charges, to which the interest of money is not liable. To purchase land is every where in Europe a most unprofitable employment of a small capital. For the sake of the superior security, indeed, a man of moderate circumstances, when he retires from business, will sometimes chuse to lay out his little capital in land. A man of profession too, whose revenue is derived from another source, often loves to secure his savings in the same way. But a young man, who, instead of applying to trade or to some profession, should employ a capital of two or three thousand pounds in the purchase and cultivation of a small piece of land, might indeed expect to live very happily, and very independently, but must bid adieu, for ever, to all hope of either great fortune or great illustration, which by a different employment of his stock he might have had the same chance of acquiring with other people. Such a person too, though he cannot aspire at being a proprietor, will often disdain to be a farmer. The small quantity of land, therefore, which is brought to market, and the high price of what is brought ^dthither^d prevents a great number of capitals from being employed in its cultivation and improvement which would otherwise have taken that direction. In North America, on the contrary, fifty or sixty pounds is often found a sufficient stock to begin a plantation with. The purchase and improvement of uncultivated land, is there the most profitable employment of the smallest as well as of the greatest capitals, and the most direct road to all the fortune and illustration which can be acquired in that country. Such land, indeed, is in North America to be had almost for nothing, or at a price much below the value of the natural produce; a thing impossible in Europe, or, indeed, in any country where all lands have long been private property.46 If landed estates, however, were divided equally among all the children, upon the death of any proprietor who left a numerous family, the estate would generally be sold. So much land would come to market, that it could no longer sell at a monopoly price. The free rent of the land would go nearer to pay the interest of the purchase–money, and a small capital might be employed in purchasing land as profitably as in any other way.

20England, on account of the natural fertility of the soil, of the great extent of ^ethe^e sea–coast in proportion to that of the whole country, and of the many navigable rivers which run through it, and afford the conveniency of water carriage to some of the most inland parts of it, is perhaps as well fitted by nature as any large country in Europe, to be the seat of foreign commerce, of manufactures for distant sale, and of all the improvements which these can occasion. From the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth too, the English legislature has been peculiarly attentive to the interests of commerce and manufactures, and in reality there is no country in Europe, Holland itself not excepted, of which the law is, upon the whole, more favourable to this sort of industry. Commerce and manufactures have accordingly been continually advancing during all this period. The cultivation and improvement of the country has, no doubt, been gradually advancing too: But it seems to have followed slowly, and at a distance, the more rapid progress of commerce and manufactures. The greater part of the country must probably have been cultivated before the reign of Elizabeth; and a very great part of it still remains uncultivated, and the cultivation of the far greater part, much inferior to what it might be. The law of England, however, favours agriculture not only indirectly by the protection of commerce, but by several direct encouragements. Except in times of scarcity, the exportation of corn is not only free, but encouraged by a bounty.47 In times of moderate plenty, the importation of foreign corn is loaded with duties that amount to a prohibition.48 The importation of live cattle, except from Ireland, is prohibited at all times,49 and it is but of late that it was permitted from thence.50 Those who cultivate the land, therefore, have a monopoly against their countrymen for the two greatest and most important articles of land produce, bread and butcher’s meat. These encouragements, though at bottom, perhaps, as I shall endeavour to show hereafter,51 altogether illusory, sufficiently demonstrate at least the good intention of the legislature to favour agriculture. But what is of much more importance than all of them, the yeomanry of England are rendered as secure, as independent, and as respectable as law can make them.52 No country, therefore, in which the right of primogeniture takes place, which pays tithes, and where perpetuities, though contrary to the spirit of the law, are admitted in some cases, can give more encouragement to agriculture than England. Such, however, notwithstanding, is the state of its cultivation. What would it have been, had the law given no direct encouragement to agriculture besides what arises indirectly from the progress of commerce, and had left the yeomanry in the same condition as in most other countries of Europe? It is now more than two hundred years since the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, a period as long as the course of human prosperity usually endures.53

21France seems to have had a considerable share of foreign commerce near a century before England was distinguished as a commercial country. The marine of France was considerable, according to the notions of the times, before the expedition of Charles the VIIIth to Naples. The cultivation and improvement of France, however, is, upon the whole, inferior to that of England. The law of the country has never given the same direct encouragement to agriculture.

22The foreign commerce of Spain and Portugal to the other parts of Europe, though chiefly carried on in foreign ships, is very considerable. That to their colonies is carried on in their own, and is much greater, on account of the great riches and extent of those colonies. But it has never introduced any considerable manufactures for distant sale into either of those countries, and the greater part of both still remains uncultivated. The foreign commerce of Portugal is of older standing than that of any great country in Europe, except Italy.54

23Italy is the only great country of Europe which seems to have been cultivated and improved in every part, by means of foreign commerce and manufactures for distant sale. Before the invasion of Charles the VIIIth, Italy, according to Guicciardin,55 was cultivated not less in the most mountainous and barren parts of the country, than in the plainest and most fertile. The advantageous situation of the country, and the great number of independent states which at that time subsisted in it, probably contributed not a little to this general cultivation. It is not impossible too, notwithstanding this general expression of one of the most judicious and reserved of modern historians, that Italy was not at that time better cultivated than England is at present.

24The capital, however, that is acquired to any country by commerce and manufactures, is all a very precarious and uncertain possession, till some part of it has been secured and realized in the cultivation and improvement of its lands. A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another. No part of it can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings, or in the lasting improvement of lands.56 No vestige now remains of the great wealth, said to have been possessed by the greater part of the Hans towns, except in the obscure histories of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is even uncertain where some of them were situated, or to what towns in Europe the Latin names given to some of them belong. But though the misfortunes of Italy in the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries greatly diminished the commerce and manufactures of the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, those countries still continue to be among the most populous and best cultivated in Europe. The civil wars of Flanders, and the Spanish government which succeeded them, chased away the great commerce of Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. But Flanders still continues to be one of the richest, best cultivated, and most populous provinces of Europe. The ordinary revolutions of war and government easily dry up the sources of that wealth which arises from commerce only. That which arises from the more solid improvements of agriculture, is much more durable, and cannot be destroyed but by those more violent convulsions occasioned by the depredations of hostile and barbarous nations continued for a century or two together; such as those that happened for some time before and after the fall of the Roman empire in the western provinces of Europe.

[1 ]See above, I.x.c.19, II.i.28, IV.ix.37 and 48.

[2 ]The gains from trade are described in similar terms at IV.i.31 and IV.iii.c.4. Cf. I.xi.c.4.

[3 ]See above, I.xi.b.4, regarding the costs of transport.

[4 ]It is stated at IV.iii.c.2 that ‘nothing . . . can be more absurd’ than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade. Cf. IV.i.8.

[5 ]See above, II.iv.17.

[6 ]It is stated at IV.vii.43–44 that the lack of manufactures for distant sale in America was the consequence of mercantile policy with regard to the colonies, although it is also pointed out that their state of improvement was such as to preclude them.

[7 ]See IV.vii.b.2 and 19. Cf. I.ix.11.

[8 ]See below, III.iv.11 where Smith describes the nature of this kind of dependence.

[a–a]their 1

[b–b]it 1

[9 ]See, for example, I.iii.7, II.v.22 and IV.ix.40.

[10 ]See above, II.v.21, and below, IV.vii.b.56, IV.vii.c.38, and V.iii.83.

[11 ]This argument is a feature of III.iii.

[1 ]In both LJ (A) and LJ (B) Smith dealt at some length with the rise, progress, and decline, of Greece and Rome. The argument then offered a version of the events outlined in the following chapters of this Book, treating these events as parts of a single historical argument ranging from the foundation of Greek civilization to the English Revolution Settlement. See generally, LJ (A) iv. and LJ (B) 5–99, ed. Cannan 9–72. It would appear that when Smith came to write this section of the WN, he decided to divide the historical argument by starting from the fall of Rome, and placing much of the material which was concerned with earlier classical experience in V.i.a and b.

The subjects of this particular chapter are covered in LJ (B) 285–99, ed. Cannan 222–31, where Smith in effect continued the critique of the mercantile system as established in previous lectures, by examining the causes of the slow progress of opulence. In the case of agriculture, Smith reviewed the natural impediments to growth, such as lack of stock, before going on to consider the influence of ‘oppresive measures’ such as the feudal services, the laws of entail, and other factors which had contributed to slow down the rate of growth in this field. ED 5 provides a similar argument. The only major point of contrast between these references and WN is that the former discuss forms of lease before proceeding to examine the laws of primogeniture and entail. In LJ (B) 299–307, ed. Cannan 231–6, the discussion continues from this point to consider the causes of the slow progress of manufactures. These passages do not occur in ED or in LJ (A).

One possible reason for Smith’s decision to separate the discussion from the general critique of mercantilism in this way, may be that in the historical period examined in this Book, dealing as it does with the transition from the feudal to the ‘commercial’ stage, Smith was concerned with a socio–economic system as distinct from a system of police or government policy. Moreover, in the period examined, the development of foreign trade is shown to be a major force contributing to socio–economic change, and the point is made at I.xi.o.14 that this development was not marked by a restrictive (mercantile) policy on the part of governments with regard to trade.

[2 ]The causes of the decline of Rome are considered below, V.i.a.36. Smith also refers, at V.i.b.16, to ‘our German and Scythian ancestors’ as having just emerged from the shepherd state. Smith refers to the savage nations ‘issuing out from Scandinavia and other Northern countries’ in LJ (A) iii.12; LJ (A) ii.97 records that among the nations which invaded Rome, ‘society was a step further advanced than amongst the Americans at this day’ in that they had arrived at ‘the state of shepherds, and had even some little agriculture’. Cf. below, V.i.a.2, and LJ (B) 184, ed. Cannan 137, where it is stated that the ‘Germans were much further advanced than the Americans at this day’. Smith also comments on the confusions following the collapse of Rome, Astronomy, IV.21, in explaining the ‘entire neglect’ of the sciences for several centuries thereafter.

[3 ]LJ (A) iv.117: ‘the country was infested by robbers and banditti, so that the cities soon became deserted, for unless there be a free communication betwixt the country and the town to carry out the manufactures and import provisions, no town can subsist.’ See also LJ (B) 50, ed. Cannan 35.

[4 ]ED 5.5 comments that ‘the chiefs of an independent nation which settles in any country, either by conquest or otherwise, as soon as the idea of private property in land is introduced never leave any part of the Land vacant, but constantly, from that greediness which is natural to man, seize much greater tracts of it to themselves than they have, either strength or stock to cultivate.’ See also LJ (B) 289–90, ed. Cannan 224–5; 50, ed. Cannan 35. In LJ (A) iv.114 it is stated that the Germans had a knowledge of ‘agriculture and of property in land’ and that ‘The first thing therefore which they set about after they had got possession of any kingdom, as Britain, France, etc., was to make a division of the lands.’ The form of government thus introduced by such peoples as the Saxons, Franks, Visigoths, and Burgundians, is described in LJ (A) iv.114–24 and stated to be ‘allodial properly so called’.

Montesquieu also commented on the form of government found among the German nations which overran the Western empire, and added that the ‘corruption’ of the form of government which they introduced had, in the long run, the surprising effect of giving ‘birth to the best species of constitution that could possibly be imagined by man!’ (Esprit, XI.viii.3). See especially Books XXX and XXXI, where Montesquieu traces the progress of institutions in France from the period of German dominance with its allodial form of government, until the advent of the feudal system. Elsewhere he remarked: ‘No doubt but these barbarians retained in their respective conquests the manners, inclinations, and usages of their own country; for no nation can change in an instant their manner of thinking and acting.’ (Esprit, XXX.vi.2).

[5 ]It is pointed out at III.iv.19 that such institutions impede the sale of land and thus the flow of capital to agriculture. Smith attributed the rapid rate of growth attained in America, at least in part, to the absence of such laws, IV.vii.b.19. Cf. Montesquieu ‘. . . The laws ought to abolish the right of primogeniture among the nobles, to the end that by a continual division of the inheritances their fortunes be always upon a level.’ (Esprit, V.viii.20):

[6 ]The law of succession among the Romans is described in LJ (A) i.94–104, where it is stated that ‘all children shared equally in the estate of the father or master of the family’. Smith also commented that wealth was divided equally in the shepherd states of Greece at the time of the Trojan War in LJ (A) iv.11. Speaking of modern countries in LJ (A) i.104 he states that the succession to moveables was founded ‘on precisely the same principles’ as in Rome and that ‘during the allodiall government of Europe, the succession to land estates was directed in the same manner’. It is stated in LJ (A) i.115–16 that the Goths, Huns and Vandals originally used the natural law of succession and that the law of primogeniture was ‘contrary to nature, to reason, and to justice’, being occasioned by the nature of the feudal government. The laws of succession among the Romans are considered at some length by Montesquieu (Esprit, XXVII.i). See below, IV.vii.a.3.

[7 ]Lord Stair justified primogeniture as the means for ‘the preservation of the memory and dignity of families, which by frequent divisions of the inheritance would become despicable or forgotten’. (Institutions of the Law of Scotland, III.iv.22).

[8 ]Cf. LJ (A) iv.46: ‘We see that there is in man a great propensity to continue his regard towards those which are nearly connected with him whom we have formerly respected. The sons and particularly the eldest son commonly attract this regard, as they seem most naturally to come in the place of their father; and accordingly in most nations have been continu’d in their father’s dignity.’ See also LJ (B) 161, ed. Cannan 118, and LJ (A) i.133: ‘it was not the introduction of the feudal government and military fiefs that brought in the right of primogeniture; but the independency of the great allodiall estates, and the inconveniences attending divisions of such estates.’

[9 ]A similar phrase is used below, V.i.f.20, in discussing religious observances. Smith gave a good deal of attention to these issues, and provides examples of institutions which had once been useful but were now outdated in LJ (B) 304, ed. Cannan 235, and LJ (A) i.96, LJ (A) ii.38–41. In the latter place he argued that thirlage, i.e. that rule which obliged a number of farms to grind their corn at a certain mill, while justified at its first inception, was ‘one of those old constitutions which had much better be removed; and of this sort there are many.’

[10 ]LJ (B) 167, ed. Cannan 123, states that ‘Entails were first introduced into the modern law by the ecclesiastics, whose education made them acquainted with the Roman customs.’ It is also stated at LJ (A) i.155 that ‘In time however entails were introduced among the Romans, and . . . this was brought about by means of fideicommisses.’

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[11 ]Smith makes this point at some length in LJ (A) i.130 and suggests that the great allodial lords were ‘in much the same state as the greater and lesser princes of Germany at this day’. He also pointed out that the problem of power made the division of lands undesirable, using the homely example of the Gordon, Douglas, and Fraser families in Scotland (133).

[12 ]Hume makes the interesting comment: ‘the most important law in its consequences, which was enacted during the reign of Henry [4 Henry 7, c.24] was that by which the nobility and gentry acquired a power of breaking the ancient entails, and of alienating their estates.’ (The History of England (1778) iii.400.) See also v.490.

[b–b]3–6

[13 ]The figure might not be unreasonable. It was estimated that about one–half of the land of Scotland was entailed early in the nineteenth century. H. H. Monteath, ‘Heritable Rights’, in G. C. H. Paton, ed., An Introduction to Scottish Legal History (Edinburgh, 1958), 177.

[14 ]It is stated in LJ (B) 163, ed. Cannan 120, that the right of primogeniture ‘hinders agriculture’ and at 168, ed. Cannan 124, that entails are ‘absurd’. Similar points are made in LJ (B) 295, ed. Cannan 228, and ED 5.9. It is argued in LJ (A) i.164 that it is ‘altogether absurd to suppose that our ancestors who lived 500 years ago should have had the power of disposing of all lands at this time’. See below, III.iv.3.

[15 ]See below, III.iv.13.

[16 ]In Letter 30 addressed to Lord Shelburne, dated 4 April 1759, Smith wrote that: ‘We have in Scotland some noblemen whose estates extend from the east to the west sea, who called themselves improvers, & are called so by their countrymen, when they cultivate two or three hundred acres round their own family seat, while they allow all the rest of their country to lie waste, almost uninhabited & entirely unimproved, not worth a shilling the hundred acres, without thinking themselves answerable to God, their country & their Posterity for so shameful as well as so foolish a neglect.’

[17 ]Smith refers to the ‘disorderly state’ of Europe at the time of the feudal government at V.ii.g.6, III.iv.9, and comments at I.xi.e.23 on the ‘disorderly state’ of England under the Plantagenets ands its economic consequences. See also V.iii.1, where Smith mentions the problem of hoarding in a ‘rude state of society’, and cf. II.i.31.

[18 ]Cf. LJ (B) 282, ed. Cannan 220: ‘The peasants had leases which depended upon the caprice of their masters . . . As little could the landlords increase their wealth as they lived so indolent a life and were involved in perpetual wars.’ LJ (A) iii.112 comments: ‘The reason of the loss in cultivating land in this manner other than by free tenants will be very evident. The slave or villain who cultivated the land cultivated it entirely for his master; whatever it produced over and above his maintenance belonged to the landlord.’ Cf. I.viii.44 and I.x.b.15.

[19 ]These points are also made in LJ (A) iv.142, where Smith also adds that the tenants at will were secured in the benefit of marriage by the clergy: ‘It was also a rule that if the lord used him unjustly, or did not plead his cause and appear for him in court when he was accused, and it was found that he was innocent in this case, he was free.’ In the same place, Smith described the villeins as the first of the ignoble classes, and the inhabitants of cities as the second. See below, III.iii, and LJ (B) 56–7, ed. Cannan 39–40.

[20 ]See below, V.ii.g.11.

[21 ]Montesquieu cites as the most imperfect form of its type, the aristocratic government of Poland where ‘the peasants are slaves to the nobility’ (Esprit, II.iii.11). He also states that ‘real’ (as distinct from ‘personal’) slavery still subsisted in Hungary, Bohemia, and ‘several parts of Lower Germany (Esprit, XV.ix.1).

[22 ]See LJ (B) 134, ed. Cannan 96 and ED 5.6–7. Cf. LJ (A) iii. 101–2:

We are apt to imagine that slavery is entirely abolished at this time, without considering that this is the case in only a small part of Europe; not remembering that all over Muscovy and all the eastern parts of Europe, and the whole of Asia, that is, from Bohemia to the Indian Ocean, all over Africa, and the greatest part of America, it is still in use. It is indeed allmost impossible that it should ever be totally or generally abolished. In a republican government it will scarcely ever happen that it should be abolished. The persons who make all the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves. A similar point is made in LJ (A) iii.114. In LJ (B) 138, ed. Cannan 99, colliers and salters are cited as examples of slave labour in modern times ‘in our own country’ and ED 5.6 also refers to ‘those who work in the coal and salt works of Scotland’. In LJ (A) iii.126 such people are described as the ‘only vestiges of slavery which remain amongst us’ and their condition, as ‘far more easy in many points than . . . antient slaves’. Smith pointed out, however, that the colliers and salters were sold along with their place of work: ‘They in this respect resemble the villani or adscripti glebae in Germany, which always go along with the land they cultivate but can not be sold separate. The colliers in the same manner are adscripti operi they are sold allong with the work, but cannot be sold or given away singly.’ (LJ (A) iii.127.) See also LJ (A) iii.96, where he refers to ‘legall slaves at this time’.

[23 ]Smith comments on the poor productivity of slave labour at I.viii.41 and IV.ix.47. See also LJ (A) iii.112, ED 5.6, and LJ (B) 138, 290, 299, ed. Cannan 99, 225, 231. He also remarked in LJ (A) iii.131 that slavery was detrimental to population growth. For alternative views, though in a different context, see A. H. Conrad and J. R. Meyer, Studies in Econometric History (London, 1965), 43–114.

[24 ]‘And we forsooth are surprised that we do not get the same profits from the labour of slave–gangs as used to be obtained from that of generals.’ (Pliny, Natural History, XVIII. iv, translated by H. Rackham in Loeb Classical Library (1950), v.203. Columella, De Re Rustica, i (preface), 11–12, translated by H. B. Ash in Loeb Classical Library (1941), i.9–11.)

[25 ]‘All the discourses of Socrates are masterly, noble, new, and inquisitive; but that they are all true it may probably be too much to say. For now with respect to the number just spoken of, it must be acknowledged that he would want the country of Babylonia for them, or some one like it, of an immeasurable extent, to support five thousand idle persons, besides a much greater number of women and children.’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1265a, translated by William Ellis in Everyman edn. (1912), 38–9.)

[26 ]LJ (B) 134, ed. Cannan 96, comments: ‘It is to be observed that slavery takes place in all societies at their beginning, and proceeds from that tyranic disposition which may almost be said to be natural to mankind.’ In LJ (A) i.54 Smith refers to the tyranny of the feudal government and the inclination which men have to extort all they can from their inferiors. In a similar vein he refers to man’s love of domination and authority in discussing slavery in LJ (A) iii.114 and again at 130. Mandeville also refers to ‘the love of Dominion and that usurping Temper all Mankind are born with’ (The Fable of the Bees, pt. i.319, ed. Kaye, i.281).

[27 ]In ED 5.6 Smith argued that the colonies dealing in sugar and tobacco could only afford slave labour because of the ‘exhorbitancy of their profites’ arising from the monopoly of the two trades. He added that: ‘the planters in the more northern colonies, cultivating chiefly wheat and Indian corn, by which they can expect no such exhorbitant returns, find it not for their interest to employ many slaves, and yet Pennsilvania, the Jerseys and some of the Provinces of New England are much richer and more populous than Virginia, notwithstanding that tobacco is, by its ordinary high price a more profitable cultivation.’ The high profits of sugar cultivation are also mentioned in LJ (B) 291, ed. Cannan 225; See below, IV.vii.b.54, regarding the use of slave labour in the colonies.

[28 ]In commenting on the use of slaves in modern times John Millar also referred to Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., together with the American colonies. He went on to note that: ‘The Quakers of Pennsylvania, are the first body of men in those countries, who have discovered any scruples upon that account, and who seem to have thought that the abolition of this practice is a duty they owe to religion and humanity.’ (The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), VI.iii, ed. W. C. Lehmann (Cambridge 1960), 311.)

[29 ]See above, I.xi.b.32.

[30 ]LJ (A) ii.26, states that ‘The lands in Italy were . . . cultivated either by servi, slaves which were the property of the landlord, or by coloni, which were in much the same condition as the holders by steel–bow.’ The metayer system is discussed in ED 5.7. In LJ (B) 292, ed. Cannan 226, the French system is described as ‘steel–bow’.

[31 ]Smith examines the causes of change in the form of leases in III.iv.

[32 ]LJ (A) iii.127–8 comments that ‘we are not to imagine the temper of the Christian religion is necessarily contrary to slavery, . . . There are . . . many Christian countries where slavery is tollerated at this time.’ See above, III.ii.8. In LJ (B) 141–2, ed. Cannan 101–2, it was suggested that ‘Another cause of the abolition of slavery was the influence of the clergy, but by no means the spirit of Christianity, for our planters are all Christians’. Smith here cites Pope Innocent III, rather than Alexander III, as having given support to the emancipation of slaves.

[33 ]It is argued in LJ (A) iii.118–19 that the emancipation of slaves reflected the political interest of both King and Clergy, both of whom wished to reduce the power of the great barons. The clergy ‘therefore promoted greatly the emancipation of villains, and discouraged as much as lay in their power the authority of the great men over them. The king’s interest tended also to promote the same thing . . . The king’s courts, on this account, were very favourable to all claims of the villains, and on every occasion endeavoured to lessen the authority of the landlord over them.’ Smith added at iii.121–2 that the power of the Church, taken in conjunction with that of the King, helped to set the slaves at liberty, while commenting that ‘it was absolutely necessary’ that the authority of both should be great. Where this condition was satisfied, he argued, slavery had been successfully eliminated—for example, in Scotland, England, France, and Spain. Where it was not, as in Poland, Germany, Bohemia, and Russia, slavery continued to survive (see above, III.iii.8). With regard to Russia Smith remarked that: ‘tho the Tsars of Muscovy have very great power, yet slavery is still in use, as the authority of the Greek Church tho’ very considerable, has never been nearly so great as that of the Romish Church was in the other countries of Europe; as we see from the accounts of that country even before the time of Peter the Great.’ (LJ (A) iii.122.) Smith comments on the political problems presented by a powerful Church in this period at V.i.g.24.

[34 ]Tithes are stated to be inimical to improvement at V.ii.d.3. The disincentive effects here described are also cited as an objection to a variable land tax at V.ii.c.18; see also V.ii.d.2.

[35 ]This figure is also cited in ED 5.7, LJ (A) ii.25. Quesnay remarks: ‘Les terres sont communément cultivées par des fermiers avec des chevaux, ou par des métayers avec des bœufs.’ Quesnay calculated that the lands of France were cultivated by these two methods in the ratio of 6 to 30. (Œuvres Economiques et Philosophiques, ed. A. Oncken (Paris, 1888), 160 and 171.) See also Encyclopédie, vi.527f. Turgot describes the metayer system in France in section XXV of the Reflections before going on to consider what Smith later describes as ‘farmers properly so called’. Turgot added that: ‘In Picardy, Normandy, the environs of Paris, and in the majority of the Provinces of the North of France, the land is cultivated by farmers. In the Provinces of the South they are cultivated by Metayers; therefore the Provinces of the North of France are incomparably more wealthy and better cultivated than those of the South.’ See also LXIV.

[36 ]Steelbow tenants are discussed in ED 5.7 and LJ (B) 140, 174, 292, ed. Cannan 100–1, 129, 226 where it is stated that they still exist in Scotland. In LJ (A) ii.25 this form of let is described as ‘one of the worst that have ever been in use’ and in LJ (A) iii.123 the method is said to be ‘the worst of any by free tenants . . . yet greatly preferable to that by slaves’.

[37 ]‘A lease is a covenant real, that binds the possession of lands into whose hands soever afterwards they come, if the lands be not evicted by a superior title; but the termor has not the freehold in him, but holds possession, as bailiff of the freeholder, nomine alieno, by virtue of the obligation of the covenant.’ (G. Gilbert, A Treatise of Tenures (London, 1757), 34.)

[38 ]‘These estates [let for years] were originally granted to mere farmers or husbandmen, who every year rendered some equivalent in money, provisions, or other rent, to the lessors or landlords; but, in order to encourage them to manure and cultivate the ground, they had a permanent interest granted them, not determinable at the will of the lord. And yet their possession was esteemed of so little consequence, that they were rather considered as the bailiffs or servants of the lord, who were to receive and account for the profits at a settled price, than as having any property of their own.’ (W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1765–9), ii.141–2.)

[39 ]Cf. LJ (A) iii.124–5: ‘When these farmers by steel–bow had by hard labour and great parsimony got together in 10 or 20 years as much as would enable them to stock a farm, they would then make an offer to their master that they should stock the farm themselves and maintain this stock, and instead of his having the uncertain produce of the harvest, which might vary with the season, he should have a yearly gratuity, on condition that he should not be removed at pleasure, but should hold his farm for a term of years. This proposall would not only be agreable to the farmer but also to the landlord.’ The term ‘farmers properly so called’ is used in ED 5.8. In LJ (B) 292, ed. Cannan 226, they are simply described as ‘tenants, such as we have at present’.

[40 ]LJ (A) i.167 comments: ‘Farms let out for long leases . . . are those which tend most to the improvement of the country. Short ones, as leases at pleasure, can never induce the tenant to improve, as what he lays out will not be on his own account, but on an other’s.’

[41 ]For a modern interpretation see G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), 167–71.

[42 ]This writ is also mentioned at V.i.b.21 and discussed in ED 5.8, LJ (B) 293, ed. Cannan 227.

[43 ]Smith makes a similar point in LJ (B) 294, ed. Cannan 227–8. In ED 5.8 he refers to ‘the advantage which agriculture derives in England from the law which gives certain lease holders a right of voting for Members of Parliament, which thereby establishes a mutual dependance between the landlord and the tenant, and makes the former, if he has any regard to his interest in the county, very cautious of attempting to raise his rents, or of demanding any other oppressive exactions of the latter.’

[44 ]Smith comments on the security of the English yeomanry at III.iv.20.

[45 ]Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, ii.35 (1449).

[46 ]10 George III, c.51 (1770). The longer leases were granted on condition that the tenant effected improvements.

[47 ]Though only freeholders could vote in Scotland, a landowner could use his estate for electoral purposes by means of trust dispositions. Scottish politics were notoriously corrupt in the eighteenth century, perhaps no more so than in the general election of 1768. C. E. Adam (ed.), View of the Political State of Scotland in 1788 (Edinburgh, 1887). See also below, III.iv.20.

[48 ]See below, IV.ix.38.

[49 ]20 George II, c.50 (1746).

[50 ]See below, V.i.d.19.

[51 ]Most of the provisions for the maintenance of roads in Scotland, including ‘statute labour’ were reiterated by 5 George I, c.30 (1718). Statute labour was commuted for a money payment and the turnpike acts enabled additional funds to be obtained through tolls. The first Scottish turnpike act was for the county of Edinburgh in 1713, but improvements were significant only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

[52 ]See below, V.ii.g.6 and V.ii.k.20.

[53 ]Cf. LJ (B) 294, ed. Cannan 227: ‘Another embarrassment was that the feudal lords sometimes allowed the king to levy subsidies from their tenants, which greatly discouraged their industry.’ ED 5.8 also refers to the ‘arbitrary and exorbitant tallages’ to which tenants were liable.

[54 ]The taille is described more extensively below, V.ii.g.5 f.

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[55 ]‘Subsidies and fifteenths are frequently mentioned by historians; but neither the amount of these taxes, nor the method of imposing them have been well explained. It appears, that the fifteenths formerly corresponded to the name, and were that proportionable part of the moveables. But a valuation being made, during the reign of Edward III that valuation was always adhered to, and each town payed unalterably a particular sum, which they themselves assessed upon the inhabitants. The same tax in corporate towns was called a tenth; probably, because there it was, at first, a tenth of the moveables. The whole amount of a tenth and fifteenth thro’ the kingdom, or a fifteenth, as it is often more concisely called, was about 29,000 pound.’ (Hume, History of England (1778), vi.174.) See also R. Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs or Boroughs (London, 1711), 39.

[56 ]See below, IV.vii.b.2 where Smith comments on the absence of rent payments in the American colonies.

[57 ]A similar point is made in LJ (B) 291, ed. Cannan 226.

[58 ]After discussing the agriculture of Holland and Berne, Harte continues: ‘That republics are better calculated than monarchies, for the advancement of agriculture, is partly true; for most republics (from natural reasons, rather than any strange concurrence of circumstances) are generally situated in a neglected barren soil: And there it is that art and industry make the most shining improvements in husbandry. Add to this, that the common–wealth we are now speaking of, and others of Switzerland in a lesser proportion, are living proofs, that there is, in such sorts of government, something analagous to the advancement of agriculture. The inhabitants are free from ambition (at least for a considerable time after the first establishment of their community;) Liberty gives them scope to exercise their industry, and equality excites emulation: For suddenly acquired fortunes out–strip, over–shade, and starve the lesser ones; whilst luxury keeps always in proportion to the inequality of fortunes—Besides, small shares of property are better distinguished, secured, and bounded: And, at the same time, more capable of admitting a correct and accurate husbandry.’ (Essays on Husbandry (London, 1764), 79.)

[59 ]The prohibition on the export of corn in ancient times is mentioned in ED 5.10 and in LJ (B) 296–7, ed. Cannan 229.

[60 ]See IV.v.b.10, 26 and generally IV.v.b.

[61 ]See above, I.xi.b.12. The distribution of foreign corn is also mentioned at V.iii.61.

[1 ]Smith considers the origins of cities in ancient Greece in LJ (B) 32–3, ed. Cannan 23.

[2 ]In LJ (A) i.112, Smith comments on the servile condition of those living on the land and adds: ‘It is . . . certain, tho’ not equally known, that the burghers and traders in towns, tho’ they might have some greater liberties, were also in a state of villainage. This is evident from the charters granted them in the earliest times . . .’ Smith then went on to make similar points to those cited in the text, with regard to the rights of marriage, succession, etc.

[3 ]Smith refers to taxes on hawkers and pedlars at V.ii.g.2.

[4 ]Duties of passage are considered below, V.ii.k.56.

[5 ]See below, V.ii.k.20, where Smith comments on the position of merchants at this period.

[6 ]Cf. Hume (History of England (1778), i.205–6): ‘we find, by the extracts which Dr. Brady has given us from Domesday, that almost all the inhabitants even of towns, had placed themselves under the clientship of some particular nobleman, whose patronage they purchased by annual payments, and whom they were obliged to consider as their sovereign, more than the king himself, or even the legislature.’ The Domesday Book is also cited at V.ii.c.21 and LJ (B) 301, ed. Cannan 232–3. In LJ (A) iv.143 it is stated that at the time of William the Conqueror, towns such as York were very small:

The lawless and disorderly state of the country rendered communication dangerous, and besides there was little demand for any of the produce of the mechanick. There were therefore but few of them in the country and very small towns. The tradesman or merchant in a country in that state would be altogether helpless. They were generally slaves of some lord, or if they were poor freemen they became dependents either on the king or on some great lord, according as their lands lay most contiguous and were best able to afford them protection and liberty. By this means they were very little better than villains or slaves of these great men. In LJ (B) 302, ed. Cannan 233, Smith commented on the impediment to economic progress represented by the ‘mean and despicable idea’ which men had of merchants at this time. He added:

when merchants were so despicable and laid under so great taxations for liberty of trade, they could never amass that degree of stock which is necessary for making the division of labour and improving manufactures. The only persons in those days who made any money by trade were the Jews, who, as they were considered as vagabonds, had no liberty of purchasing lands, and had no other way to dispose of themselves but by becoming mechanics or merchants. Their character could not be spoiled by the merchandize, because they could not be more odious than their religion made them. Even they were grievously oppressed and consequently the progress of opulence was greatly retarded. See below, V.iii.1 where Smith comments that at one time to trade was ‘disgraceful to a gentleman’ and the lending of money at interest even more so. Very similar ideas with regard to the mean condition of merchants and the persecution of the Jews are stated by Montesquieu, Esprit, XXI.xx, in a section entitled ‘How Commerce broke through the Barbarism of Europe’.

[a * ]See Brady’s historical treatise of Cities and Burroughs, p. 3, &c.a [For example: ‘. . . the Kings of England kept this Burg [Yarmouth] in their own Hands, and received by their Officers the Profits of the Port, until the time of King John, who in the 9th year of his Reign Granted the Burg in Fee–Farm to the Burgesses for ever, at the Rent of Fifty Five Pounds by the Year to be paid by the Provost or Bayliff of Yarmouth, and Granted they should yearly chuse a Bayliff amongst themselves, fit both to serve him, and themselves.’ After a number of similar instances from Domesday Brady continued, ‘By these instances we find the Burgesses or Tradesmen in great Towns, had in those times their Patrons under whose Protection they Traded, and paid an acknowledgement therefor, or else were in a more Servile Condition, as being in Dominio Regis vel aliorum, altogether under the power of the King, or other Lords, and it seems to me that then they Traded not, as being in any Merchant–Gild, Society and Community, but meerly under the Liberty and Protection given them by their Lords and Patrons, who probably might have Power from the King to Licence such a number in this or that Port, or Trading Town . . .’ (R. Brady, Cities and Boroughs, 3 and 16.)

[b–b]2–6

[cc* ]See Madox Firma Burgi, p. 18, also History of the Exchequer, chap. 10. Sect. v. p. 223, first edition.c [‘The yearly profit which the King made of his Cities Towns or Burghs was commonly raised and paid to Him in a sundry manner . . . sometimes the King was pleased to demise or let his Town to the Townsmen thereof at Ferm, that is to say, either in Fee–ferm, or at Ferm for Years.’ But Madox does not suggest the development came necessarily from the farming of the poll tax. ‘The yearly Ferme of Towns arose out of certain locata or demised things that yielded Issues or profit. Insomuch that when a Town was committed to a Sherif Fermer or Custos, such Fermer or Custos well knew how to raise the Ferme out of the ordinary issues of the Towns, with an overplus of profit to himself.’ (T. Madox, Firma Burgi 18 and 251.) ‘From the reign of K. William I, down to the succeeding times, the King . . . used to let–out the several Counties of England upon a yearly Ferm or Rent concerted between the Crown and the Fermer, or else to commit them to Custody.’ (Madox, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (London, 1711), 223.) In Letter 115 addressed to Lord Hailes, dated 15 January 1769 Smith also described Madox’s work as the History of the Exchequer.]

[7 ]‘Then the King if he pleased demised his Towns to the Townsmen or others, in like manner as he demised any of his Manors to the Tenants thereof.’ (T. Madox, Firma Burgi, 21.) Wotton–under–Edge in Gloucestershire is cited as an example.

[8 ]In LJ (A) iv.144 Smith explained the origins of the cities as part of a general drive to reduce the power of the nobles. He went on to remark that the units thus created: ‘were afterwards formed into corporations holding in capite of the king, having a jurisdiction and territory for which they paid a certain rent. At first this was taken up from every individual, but afterwards the community farmed it, which made the burthen much easier than when it was exacted without distinction by the king’s officers.’ See also LJ (A) iv.151–2, and LJ (B) 57, ed. Cannan 40.

[9 ]Brady (Cities and Boroughs, 17) explained the development: ‘How long in most Burghs, very many Burgesses remained in this Servile State, or others in a Middle or Neutral State of between Servitude and Freedom; I cannot say certainly, but do suppose, until our Ancient Norman Kings granted by their Charters, there should be Merchant or Trading–Gilds, Communities and Societies, in Burghs, and gave them Free Liberty of Trade, without paying Toll or Custom anywhere, other than their Fee–Farm–Rent in Lieu of them, where that was Reserved; or to Raise and Multiply such Payments by Incouragement of Trade, which by the Grants of such Liberties did mightily Increase, where the Kings Bayliffs collected them.’

[10 ]See I.x.c.17.

[11 ]In LJ (A) ii.39 Smith found the origins of corporations in the need to ensure that the inhabitants of cities had the means of defending themselves, while pointing out that they also gave a degree of security to individuals working in particular trades, encouraging by this means the division of labour. See above I.ii.1.

[dd* ]See Madox Firma Burgi: See also Pfeffel in the remarkable events under Frederick II. and his successors of the house of Suabia.d [The heading ‘evénements remarquables sous Frédéric II’ is used by Pfeffel for several similar chapters. C. F. Pfeffel von Kriegelstein, Nouvel Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire et du droit publique d’Allemagne (Paris, 1766), i.284–307.]

[12 ]Hume also noted that ‘The government of cities . . ., even under absolute monarchies, is commonly republican.’ (History of England (1778), vi.295.)

[13 ]This point is elaborated in the following chapter, III.iv. especially 8 and 9.

[14 ]That did not prevent medieval lords from trying to set up ‘towns’ on their lands. M. W. Beresford, The New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantations in England, Wales and Gascony (1967).

[15 ]The additional problem which was presented by the power of the Church is considered below, V.i.g.17.

[16 ]The king is identified as John in LJ (A) iii.74. It is also pointed out in LJ (A) iv.154 that the feudal emoluments tended to decline at the very time that the needs of government increased, and that in consequence the reigns most favourable to liberty were ‘those of martiall, conquering, military kings. Edward the 1st and Henry the 4th, the two most warlike of the English kings, granted greater immunities to the people than any others.’ Two reasons are suggested: first, that such kings became dependent on the people for funds, and, secondly, that ‘it soon became a rule with the people that they should grant no subsidies till their requests were first granted’.

[ee* ]See Madox.e [‘King John granted some of his Towns in Normandy, to wit, to Falaise, Danfront, and Caen, that they might have a Communa during his pleasure.’ (T. Madox, Firma Burgi, 35.)]

[17 ]G. Daniel, Histoire de France (Amsterdam 1720) was a work which Smith ordered for Glasgow University Library. His Quaestor’s accounts are printed in Scott, 178–9.

[18 ]C. Du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, Glossarium (1688) s.v. Commune (Paris, 1842 edn., ii.482). Brady, quoting du Fresne, states ‘The Kings of France erected these Communities to cheque the Insolencies of their great Vassals, and to protect them from their over–grown Dominion and Extravagant Power over them, that they reputed such Cities and Towns their own, where there were such Communities; and truley, for that the Inhabitants were in a manner Freed from the Dominion of their Lords thereby, and became immediately Subject to their Kings.’ (Cities and Boroughs, 17.) Hume, citing the same source, held that ‘the erecting of these communities was an invention of Lewis the Gross, in order to free the people from slavery under the lords, and to give them protection, by means of certain privileges and a separate jurisdiction.’ (History of England (1778), ii.118.)

[19 ]See above, III.iii.7.

[ff* ]See Pfeffel.f

[20 ]Smith comments on Italian, Swiss, and German experience in LJ (A) v.46–50 and LJ (B) 77, ed. Cannan 54.

[21 ]See above, III.iii.6.

[g–g]2–6

[h]in those assemblies 1

[22 ]The origins and development of the British House of Commons are considered in LJ (A) iv.134–57, and rather more briefly in LJ(B) 58–9, ed. Cannan 40–1. Smith argues in LJ (B) 60–1, ed. Cannan 42, that the initial result of the rising importance of the Commons was the absolutist state, the point being that ‘the power of the nobility was diminished, and that too before the House of Commons had established its authority’. The same point is made in LJ (A) iv.159–60, with regard to the emergence of absolutism in Scotland and England, while in addition the examples of France, Spain, and Portugal are cited at pp. 162 and 167. In LJ (A) iv.167–8, it is emphasized that ‘In England alone a different government has been established from the naturall course of things’, partly no doubt as a consequence of her pattern of economic development, but also as a result of factors of a more ‘accidental’ kind. For example, Smith cited a number of forces which militated against the preservation of the absolute power of kings, including:

• (1) Ease of defence by sea which minimized the danger of foreign invasion, together with the political solution to the Scottish problem through union—both of which reduced the need for a standing army as a potential instrument of oppression.
• (2) The need of the King to summon Parliament on any extraordinary contingency, allied to the dependence of the Crown on the Commons for supplies—a trend which had been accelerated by the sale of Crown lands by Elizabeth I.
• (3) The gradual growth in the significance of the Commons who were eventually enabled to look upon themselves as in power ‘equall or perhaps greater’ than the nobles.
• (4) The dissipation of the civil list through the ‘extravagant and luxurious turn of Charles’ who chose to employ it in the pursuit of his pleasures so that ‘he became as necessitous and dependent on Parliament as any of the preceding monarchs had been’.
• (5) The fact that once a standing army had been formed, it became a source of security rather than of oppression owing to the fact that ‘Many of the persons of chief rank and station in the army have also large estates of their own and are members of the House of Commons.’ LJ (A) iv.168–79 (and see below, V.i.a.41). Similar points are made in LJ (A) v.1–15 where Bolingbroke’s authority is cited with regard to the conduct of Elizabeth, whose willingness to sell Crown lands was linked with her lack of a direct heir. Smith also adverts to the role of the Courts as a security for English liberties in LJ (B) 63–4, ed. Cannan 45–6. See generally, LJ (B) 60–4, ed. Cannan 42–6, and below, V.i.b.25.

[23 ]This term is used, for example, at II.iii.28, IV.v.b.43, and IV.ix.28.

[24 ]See above, II.i.30 and II.iii.36, where Smith elaborates on the importance of security for industry; and see also III.iv.4 and IV.v.b.43.

[25 ]The fact that slaves could receive their freedom after a residence of one year is mentioned in LJ (A) iv.144 and LJ (B) 57, ed. Cannan 40.

[26 ]Cantillon, Essai, 22–3, ed. Higgs 19, also noted that ‘Great Cities are usually built on the seacoast or on the banks of large Rivers for the convenience of transport; because water–carriage of the produce and merchandise necessary for the subsistence and comfort of the inhabitants is much cheaper than Carriages and Land Transport.’ See also Essai, 202–3, ed. Higgs 153.

[27 ]The importance of water carriage is emphasized in I.iii, and see also II.v.33.

[28 ]See above, I.xi.o.14, where it is pointed out that ‘It was not then the policy of Europe to restrain, by high duties, the importation of foreign manufactures, but rather to encourage it.’

[29 ]In Astronomy, IV.22, Smith refers to the development of science and the translation of classical works on astronomy into Arabic as a result of the ‘munificence of the Abassides, the second race of the Califfs’. He also remarked at § 23 that the ‘victorious arms of the Saracens carried into Spain the learning, as well as the gallantry, of the East; and along with it, . . . the Arabian translations of Ptolemy and Aristotle’.

[30 ]See LJ (A) iv.111: ‘The Italian republicks had in their hands at that time the most profitable branches of trade. They had the whole of the silk manufacture, a very profitable one, and the greatest part of the linnen trade. Their situation also gave them an opportunity of having the whole of the East Indian trade that came into Europe pass thro their hands. The Cape of Good Hope was not then discovered; the goods brought from the East Indies were conveyed up the Red Sea, from thence into the Nile, and by that means to Alexandria, where they were bought up by the Venetian and Genoese merchants chiefly, and by them dispersed thro Europe. Milan, too, tho no sea port, had great commerce. It was the centre of the trade betwixt the other towns, and had besides the greatest share of the silk trade, which all centered in it.’ Cf. LJ (B) 49, ed. Cannan 34, and below, IV.vii.a.5.

[31 ]In LJ (A) iv.68 Smith cites Genoa, Milan, and Venice as examples of democracies in former times, while pointing out that in these cases the power of the state was now in the hands of the nobility. Cf. LJ (A) v.48 and LJ (B) 34, ed. Cannan 24.

[32 ]In LJ (B) 347–8, ed. Cannan 272, the Holy War is also associated with an improvement in military manners. Smith suggested that as the European princes ‘had all been on one side in that common cause, and as they thought that Christians should not be treated in the same manner with infidels, a greater degree of humanity was introduced. From those causes, moderns behave differently from the ancients with regard to the persons of prisoners . . .’ Cf. V.i.g.21.

[i–i]in 4–6

[j–j]that were introduced into Venice in the beginning of 1

[k–k]2–6 [includes the following 3 sentences]

[ll* ]See Sandi Istoria Civile de Vinezia, Part 2. vol. 1. page 247, and 256.l [V. Sandi, Principj di Storia Civile della Republica de Venezia (Venice, 1755), part 2, i.258.]

[33 ]The manufactures of Lyons are mentioned at II.v.15. It is stated at IV.ii.1 that the British manufacturers of completed goods based on silk had been successful in prohibiting the import of foreign commodities.

[m]in 1

[n–n]flourished, there was not a mulberry tree, nor consequencely a silkworm in all Lombardy. They brought the materials from Sicily and from the Levant, the manufacture itself being in imitation of those carried on in the Greek empire. Mulberry trees were first planted in Lombard in the beginning of the sixteenth century, by the encouragement of Ludovico Sforza Duke of Milan. 1

[34 ]See above, II.v.15.

[35 ]See below, V.i.a.6.

[36 ]See above, I.xi.c.3. In discussing the location of industry, Steuart argued that the situation of manufactures which did not depend on the residence of the consumer would tend to be dictated by the conveniency of transportation, the cheapness of subsistence, and: ‘Relative to the place and situation of the establishment, which gives a preference to the sides of rivers and rivulets, when machines wrought by water are necessary; to the proximity of forests and collieries when fire is employed; to the place which produces the substance of the manufacture; as in mines, collieries, brick–works, &c.’ (Principles, i.49, ed. Skinner, i.58.) See especially, I.ix.

[37 ]See below, IV.i.29 and IV.ix.41, where the finer manufactures are stated to be the basis of foreign trade.

[38 ]The manufactures of Birmingham and Sheffield are mentioned at I.x.b.42, where the former are said to be based on fashion, and the latter on necessity.

[39 ]In his essay ‘Of Commerce’ Hume took a rather similar view to Smith’s, emphasizing the role of imitation and emulation of foreign manufactures and stating that ‘If we consult history, we shall find, that, in most nations, foreign trade has preceded any refinement in home manufactures, and given birth to domestic luxury.’ (Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Green and Grose, i.295.) A similar point is made in the essay ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ where it is stated that every improvement made in the last two hundred years in Great Britain had ‘arisen from our imitation of foreigners’ (ibid. i.346).

[1 ]See above, I.x.c.26.

[2 ]The merchant improver is contrasted with the country gentleman in LJ (B) 295, ed. Cannan 228. See below, V.ii.a.18 where Smith advocates the sale of Crown lands to those who might improve them, and cf. III.ii.7.

[3 ]For an example of such activities, see T. M. Devine, ‘Glasgow Colonial Merchants and Land, 1770–1815’, in J. T. Ward and R. G. Wilson (eds.), Land and Industry (Newton Abbot, 1971), chapter 6.

[4 ]However, it is pointed out in the concluding sentence of I.xi.n.1 that the abolition of the feudal government in the case of Spain and Portugal had not produced anything better.

[5 ]See above, I.xi.n.1, where the fall of the feudal system is linked with the establishment of a form of government which gives industry the only encouragement which it requires, namely liberty.

[6 ]Hume remarked, for example, that ‘If we consider the matter in a proper light, we shall find, that a progress in the arts is rather favourable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government.’ He then described the state of disorder found in ‘rude unpolished nations’ and went on to argue that the development of commerce had the effect of drawing ‘authority and consideration to that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty.’ Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Green and Grose, i.306. He also concluded in the essay ‘Of Commerce’ that ‘The greatness of the sovereign and the happiness of the state are, in a great measure, united with regard to trade and manufactures.’ (Ibid. i.294.) Another close student of Hume’s History, Sir James Steuart, also drew attention to the link between commerce and liberty, and having drawn attention to the changing patterns of dependence, together with changes in the balance of power, made the further comment that ‘When once a state begins to subsist by the consequences of industry, there is less danger to be apprehended from the power of the sovereign. The mechanism of his administration becomes more complex, and . . . he finds himself so bound up by the laws of his political œconomy, that every transgression of them runs him into new difficulties.’ (Principles, i.249, ed. Skinner 217; see especially, II.xiii.) Apart from Steuart, Smith’s comment that Hume was the only writer to have noticed a link between commerce and liberty seems a little odd when it is recalled that a number of works by people known to Smith had included comment on this issue: for example, Adam Ferguson’s History of Civil Society (1767) and Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774). In addition John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), chapter v, provides a close parallel with the argument of the present section. However, of the works written prior to 1776, perhaps William Robertson’s introduction to the History of Charles V (1769) provides the closest parallel to the argument of this book taken as a whole, where he traced the progress of society in Europe from the fall of the Roman empire. It has even been suggested that Robertson owed a good deal to lectures which Smith had delivered in Edinburgh, which, if true, is an interesting commentary on the age of this part of Smith’s work. See, for example, Scott, 55. Smith’s citation of Hume alone among the writers above mentioned may itself be a reflection of the age of this part of his work, and of the fact that Hume was the first author known to Smith to have commented on the subjects of this chapter.

[7 ]With regard to the relationship between dependence and the power of a superior, see below V.i.b.7. See also LJ (B) 21, 51, 159, ed. Cannan 16, 35, 116, where it is remarked that: ‘As the great had no way of spending their fortunes but by hospitality, they necessarily acquired prodigious influence over their vassals.’

[8 ]Smith comments on the hospitality (and enforced frugality) of sovereigns in this situation at IV.i.30 See also V.i.g.22, where he comments on the hospitality of the clergy. Hume describes the rustic hospitality of the great and the general conditions of the economy found in the ‘first and more uncultivated ages of any state’ in his essay ‘Of Money’ Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Green and Grose, i.317.

[9 ]Hume cites the same example in The History of England (1778), i.384.

[10 ]This figure is cited in LJ (A) i.120. Smith also cites the examples of Becket, Warwick, and Rufus, pointing out in the latter case that his hall, ‘now called Westminster Hall, is three hundred feet long and proportionably wide, and was not reckoned too large for a dining room to him and the nobles who attended his court’. In LJ (B) 59, ed. Cannan 42, the number dined by Warwick is given as 40,000 rather than the 30,000 also cited in LJ (A) iv.158. Hume gives the figure of 30,000 in The History of England (1778), iii.182.

[11 ]‘. . . an Arab Prince will often dine in the street, before his door, and call to all that pass, even beggars, in the usual expression, Bismillah, that is, In the name of God; who come and sit down, and when they have done, give their Hamdellilah, that is, God be praised. For the Arabs are great levellers, put everybody on a footing with them; and it is by such generosity and hospitality that they maintain their interest; but the middling people among them, and the Coptis, live but poorly.’ (R. Pococke, A Description of the East and some other Countries (London, 1743), i.183.)

[12 ]In Letter 116 addressed to Lord Hailes, dated 5 March 1769, Smith mentioned an additional problem found in barbarous countries, namely the dependence of travellers on the hospitality of private families, and added that ‘the danger too, of travelling either alone or with few attendants, made all men of any consequence carry along with them a numerous suite of retainers which rendered this Hospitality still more oppressive.’ Smith added that ‘Travelling, from the disorders of the Country, must have been extremely dangerous, & consequently very rare.’

[13 ]In LJ (A) iv.118–19 Smith used the distinction between tenants and retainers to explain a source of disorder within the individual estate. The lord’s ‘tenants naturally hated these idle fellows who eat up the fruits of their labours at their ease, and were allways ready to give their assistance to curb the insolence of his retainers; they again were no less ready to give their assistance to bring the tenants into proper order.’ The same point is made in LJ (B) 51, 204, ed. Cannan 35, 155, where Smith remarked that ‘great numbers of retainers were kept idle about the noblemen’s houses’ as late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Similar points are made in LJ (A) vi.3–7 where Hume’s authority is cited, and see above, II.iii.12.

[14 ]Cf. Steuart: ‘I deduce the origin of the great subordination under the feudal government from the necessary dependence of the lower classes for their subsistence. They consumed the produce of the land, as the price of their subordination, not as the reward of their industry in making it produce.’ (Principles, i.240, ed. Skinner i.208.) Steuart comments extensively on the relation between the degree of dependence and the mode of earning subsistence in II.xiii. LJ (A) i. 119 reads:

The possessors of these farms pay’d a small rent to the possessor rather as an acknowledgment of their dependence than as the value of the land. This rent again he could dispose of no other way than by bestowing it on those who came to his table. The rent of the land was accordingly paid in victualls, and the term Farm signifies properly lands which paid victualls for their rent; the world Farm signifying in the old Saxon or German language victualls.’ See above, I.iv.8. Similar points are made in LJ (A) iv. 135.

[15 ]By implication Smith recognizes the strategic benefits of maintaining a large number of retainers.

[16 ]Cf. LRBL ii.198–9: ‘In the early periods the same persons generally exercise the duties of Judge, General, and Legislator: at least the two former are very commonly conjoined . . . When men, especially in a barbarous state, are accustomed to submit themselves in some points, they naturally do it in others. The same persons therefore who judged them in peace, lead them also to battle.’ (ed. Lothian, 168) See also LJ (B) 141, ed. Cannan 101: ‘By the feudal law, the lord had an absolute sway over his vassals. In peace he was the administrator of justice, and they were obliged to follow him in war.’

[17 ]The inability of the king to enforce payment and to administer justice in the feudal period is mentioned in LJ (A) i.128 and LJ (B) 51, ed. Cannan 36. Hume remarked with reference to Scotland that: ‘Amidst the contentions of such powerful vassals, who may be considered as petty princes rather than eminent nobles, the authority of the king, which was the same with that of the laws, was very uncertain and precarious. Like the Roman pontiff in the ages of superstition, the Scottish monarch, tho’ possessed of extensive claims, enjoyed but little power; and when provoked by the rebellion of any potent baron, his usual resource was to animate some hostile clans against him, and to arm them with legal authority.’ (History of England (1754), i.60–1.)

[18 ]A similar point is made above, III.iii.8. Hume highlights the weak position of the monarch when considering the case of the Earl of Warwick: ‘The military men, allured by his munificence and hospitality, as well as by his bravery, were zealously attached to his interests: His numerous retainers were more devoted to his will, than to the prince or to the laws: And he was the greatest, as well as the last, of those mighty barons, who formerly overawed the crown, and rendered the people incapable of any regular system of civil government.’ (History of England (1778), iii.182.)

[a–a]appears 1–2

[19 ]According to Hume ‘The great influence of the lords over their slaves and tenants, the clientship of the burghers, the total want of a middling rank of men, the extent of the monarchy, the loose execution of the laws, the continued disorders and convulsions of the state; all these circumstances evince, that the Anglo–Saxon government became at last extremely aristocratical.’ The History of England (1778), i.214–15.

[20 ]Smith states that the allodial system preceded the feudal in LJ (A) i.122 and argues that there ‘is no mention of the word feodum in the English law till a few years after the Norman conquest, nor in the French till after the time of 50 or 60 years after Conrad.’ A similar point is made in LJ (B) 54–5, ed. Cannan 38, and the argument is elaborated in LJ (A) iv where Smith cites the authority of Spelman, ‘tho he does not seem to have understood it’, and that of Bouquet who is said to have ‘explaind it extremely well’. (132). Smith suggests at p. 134 that the change from allodial to feudal ‘happend in the whole of Europe about the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries’. The contrast between the two forms of constitution is explained in LJ (A) i.67 where Smith refers to countries where lands were ‘what we call allodial, i.e. held of no one, but were intirely the property of the proprietor, so that the state could not limit the use he was to make of any part of his estate. But in the feudal governments, the king was considered as the dominus directus, which had then a considerable benefit attending on it.’ The allodial system is described in LJ (B) 49–52, ed. Cannan 34–6, and in LJ (A) iv.121–4, where the popular courts which feature in this system are also mentioned. It is stated in LJ (A) iv.137 that the feudal government ‘took away every thing which was popular in the allodial form’. The transition from allodial to feudal is also described in LJ (B) 52–7, ed. Cannan 36–40. The distinction between allodial and feudal would also appear to have been grasped also by Montesquieu. See for example, Esprit, XXXI.viii. Hume also remarked that the Saxons ‘found no occasion for the feudal institutions’, and that William I ‘introduced into England the feudal law, which he found established in France and Normandy’ (History of England (1778), i.225 and 253).

[21 ]See below, V.i.a.7, where Smith refers to ‘what is properly called the feudal law’.

[22 ]A similar argument appears at V.i.b.7, where Smith considers the great authority enjoyed by the Tartar (shepherd) chiefs.

[23 ]Lochiel’s situation was not necessarily so devoid of legal authority as Smith implies. Lochiel, and others, could possess baronial rights, derived from their subject superior, in Lochiel’s case from Argyll. No written charter need exist, so long as the rights were customarily recognized. The judicial functions of Cameron of Lochiel are mentioned in LJ (A) i.129. In LJ (B) 159, ed. Cannan 116, Smith notes that ‘So lately as in the year 1745 this power remained in the Highlands of Scotland, and some gentlemen could bring several hundreds of men into the field’, and he remarks at 171, ed. Cannan 126, that in general the ‘duty of vassals to their lords continued longer in Scotland than in England’. In an interesting comment on Scottish affairs, Smith stated in LJ (A) ii.174 that Lochiel’s relative, Dr. Cameron, was ‘executed in the year ’50 or ’51 on the sentence passed on him in the year 1745. The government were then not altogether free from the fear of another rebellion, and thought it necessary to take that precaution. But had he kept out of the way for some years longer he would probably have been altogether safe.’ See also LJ (B) 200, ed. Cannan 152.

[24 ]The Highlanders are described at V.i.a.26 as ‘stationary shepherds’ unwilling to stay in arms for long periods, or to travel great distances from home—as the events of the ’45 Rebellion had proved.

[25 ]It is remarked in LJ (B) 55, ed Cannan 38–9, that ‘these historians who give an account of the origin of feudal laws from the usurpation of the nobility are quite mistaken’ since ‘it required great influence in the king to make the lords hold their land feudally’. The same point is made in LJ (A) iv.133–4, where Smith also dates the beginning of orderly government from the introduction of the feudal system, remarking that ‘the times after the conquest seem clear and enlightend compared with those of the Saxon race’. Smith argues in the same way that in France comparative order was to be found in the times of Hugh Capet as contrasted with the situation under the ‘Merovingian and Carlovingian races’. An account of the introduction of feudal law is given by Montesquieu, Esprit, XXXI.xxx.

[26 ]The burdens of wardship and marriage are mentioned in LJ (A) i.125–7, ii.17–18, and iv.128; LJ (B) 160, ed. Cannan 117. See below, V.ii.h.5, 6.

[27 ]Cf. LJ (A) i.127–8: ‘It is to be observed that this government was not at all cut out for maintaining civill government, or Police. The king had property in the land superior indeed to what the others had, but not so greatly superior as that they had any considerable power over them. The only person who had any command in the remoter parts of the kingdom was the superior or lord.’ A similar point is made in LJ (A) iv.119. See above, I.xi.e.23. Smith also refers to ‘feudal anarchy’ at III.ii.7. He comments on the superior power of the clergy as compared to the temporal lords at V.i.g.22, attributing this to their unity of interest.

[28 ]Cf. LJ (A) iv.157: ‘the power of the nobles . . . declin’d in the feudall governments from the same causes as everywhere else, viz, from the introduction of arts, commerce, and luxury.’ Cf. LJ (B) 36, ed. Cannan 25. In referring to the transition from the feudal state, Kames remarked that ‘after the Arts of Peace began to be cultivated, Manufactures and Trade to revive in Europe, and Riches to encrease, this institution behoved to turn extreme burdensome. It first tottered, and then fell by its own Weight, as wanting a solid Foundation.’ (Essays upon several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (Edinburgh, 1747), 155.)

[29 ]By contrast, Montesquieu remarks that in Poland, despite the introduction of foreign commerce, some of the lords ‘possess entire provinces; they oppress the husbandmen, in order to have greater quantities of corn, which they send to strangers, to procure the superfluous demands of luxury. If Poland had no foreign trade, its inhabitants would be happier.’ Montesquieu seems to attribute the fact that the riches of the great had done little or nothing, directly or indirectly, to encourage domestic manufactures to the sheer size of their land holdings. Montesquieu, Esprit, XX.xxiii.4. See below, n. 38.

[30 ]Cf. LJ (A) i.117: ‘men are so selfish that when they have an opportunity of laying out on their own persons what they possess, tho on things of no value, they will never think of giving it to be bestowed on the best purposes by those who stand in need of it.’ It is also stated in LJ (A) vi.7 that commerce gives the rich ‘an opportunity of spending their fortunes with fewer servants, which they never fail of embracing’. Smith comments in this context on the improvement of manners which arises as a result of reducing the number of retainers. See also LJ (B) 205–6, ed. Cannan 155–6 and cf. II.iii.12. The same theme is developed in Hume’s History of England (1778), iii.400:

The encrease of the arts, more effectually than all the severities of law, put an end to the pernicious practice [of maintaining armies of retainers]. The nobility, instead of vying with each other, in the number and boldness of their retainers, acquired by degrees a more civilized species of emulation, and endeavoured to excel in the splendour and elegance of their equipage, houses, and tables. The common people, no longer maintained in vicious idleness by their superiors, were obliged to learn some calling or industry, and became useful both to themselves and to others . . . Hume also noted in his essay ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ (Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Green and Grose, i.301), that: Another advantage of industry and of refinements in the mechanical arts, is, that they commonly produce some refinements in the liberal; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some degree, with the other. The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship–carpenters.

[31 ]LJ (A) i.117–18 comments on the limited dependence of the tradesman and adds: ‘This manner of laying out ones money is the chief cause that the balance of property conferrs so small a superiority of power in modern times. A tradesman to retain your custom, may perhaps vote for you in an election, but you need not expect that he will attend you to battle.’ In LRBL ii.144, ed. Lothian 144, the same point is made with reference to Greek experience; commerce and luxury ‘gave the lowest an opportunity of raising themselves to an equality with the nobles, and the nobles an easy way of reducing themselves to the state of the meanest citizen’. See especially lectures 25 and 26. Cf. LJ (B) 36, ed. Cannan 25: ‘When a man becomes capable of spending on domestic luxury what formerly supported an hundered retainers, his power and influence naturaly decrease.’ See also LJ (B) 59, ed. Cannan 42, and below, V.iii.3.

[32 ]Smith examines the breakdown in the power of the clergy at V.i.g.24, 25, and attributes it to the same process. He suggests, however, that this decline took place more rapidly than in the case of the lords. See also IV.i.30.

[33 ]Cf. LJ (A) iii.135: ‘A man who consumes 10,000 pounds appears to destroy what ought to give maintenance to 1000 men. He therefore appears to be the most destructive member of society we can possibly conceive. But if we observe this man we will find that he is in no way prejudiciall to society, but rather of advantage to it.’ A similar example occurs in LJ (A) i.119.

[34 ]A similar point is made at V.i.b.7 where it is stated that the power of the landlord in an opulent state must be diminished, since ‘as he gives scarce any thing to any body but in exchange for an equivalent, there is scarce any body who considers himself as entirely dependent upon him’.

[35 ]See above, I.xi.c.7.

[36 ]Cf. III.i.5, where Smith comments on the attitude of the American colonists to even this degree of dependence.

[37 ]The same point is made with regard to the clergy as landowners at V.i.g.25.

[38 ]This general statement is further qualified in LJ (A) iv.166: ‘The ruin of the feudall government which followed on arts and luxury had a very different effect in Germany: it occasioned the increase of the power and absolute authority of the great nobles or princes of the empire, and not of the emperor.’ This is explained as being due to the sheer size of the country and the extent of the fortunes held by the nobility. See LJ (A) iv.161–4, LJ (B) 60, ed. Cannan 43, and above, n. 29. Smith comments on the military consequences of this situation, and of the decay of the feudal militia, at V.i.a.37.

[39 ]In TMS VI.ii.1.12 Smith commented on the importance of family in another sense, with regard to pastoral communities: an ‘extensive regard to kindred is said to take place among the Tartars, the Arabs, the Turkomans, and, I believe, among all other nations who are nearly in the same state of society in which the Scots Highlanders were about the beginning of the present century.’ Smith contrasts this situation with that prevailing in commercial countries.

[40 ]It is remarked in LJ (B) 28, ed. Cannan 20, that ‘In no age is antiquity of family more respected than in this’, and in LJ (A) iv.44, with regard to the respect shown for antiquity and family at certain stages of society, Smith refers to a history recently translated from the French (in turn translated from the Swedish) of a man taken prisoner while with Charles XII of Sweden, and carried into Russia. Smith refers to this history as providing ‘just such an account as we should expect to meet with in the history of one of the clans in the remoter parts of this country’. In the same place, Smith points out that ‘the Jews, who were originally a tribe of Arabs, paid the greatest respect to genealogies and were at great pains to preserve them.’ It is stated at V.i.b.10 with regard to the shepherd state that there are ‘no nations . . . who abound more in families revered and honoured on account of their descent . . .’

[41 ]A similar form of argument is used below when speaking of the collapse in the temporal power of the clergy. V.i.g.24.

[42 ]See above, II.v.21 and IV.vii.b.17.

[43 ]The same figures are cited above, I.viii.23.

[44 ]See above, III.ii.2, and below, IV.vii.b.19.

[b–b]om. 5–6

[c–c]all with 1

[45 ]See above, III.ii.7, where Smith comments that great proprietors are seldom great improvers, and III.iv.3, where it is stated that merchants are the best of all. Smith also recommends the sale of crown lands to accelerate improvement at V.ii.a.18.

[d–d]2–6

[46 ]See below, IV.vii.b.2.

[e–e]2–6

[47 ]See above, I.xi.g.4, and below, IV.v.a.5, IV.v.b.37, V.ii.k.13.

[48 ]22 Charles II, c.13 (1670). See below, IV.ii.1, IV.ii.16, IV.v.a.23, IV.v.b.33 and 37, IV.vii.b.33, V.ii.k.13.

[49 ]18 and 19 Charles II, c.2 (1666) in Statutes of the Realm, v.597; 18 Charles II, c.2 in Ruffhead’s edition declared that from 2 February 1666 the importation of cattle is a ‘publique and common Nusance’. Earlier 15 Charles II, c.7 (1663) had imposed a levy on any cattle imported: 20s. for each head to the King; 10s to the informer; 10s. to the poor of the parish where the information was laid. See also 32 Charles II, c.2 (1680). See below, IV.ii.1, 16 and V.ii.k.13.

[50 ]32 George II, c.11 (1758), extended by 5 George III, c.10 (1765) and 12 George III, c.2 (1772). See also IV.ii.17 and V.ii.k.13. Salt provisions from Ireland were allowed on payment of duty by 4 George III, c.1 (1763), later extended and without duty by 8 George III, c.9 (1768) and 12 George III, c.2 (1772).

[51 ]See below, IV.ii.16–22, and generally IV.v.b.

[52 ]See above, III.ii.14 and 15.

[53 ]See above, II.v.22. Cantillon, Essai, 244, ed. Higgs 185, also remarked that ‘When a State has arrived at the highest point of wealth . . . it will inevitably fall into poverty by the ordinary course of things.’ He cites as examples the fate of Venice, the Hanseatic Towns, etc. at 246–7, ed. Higgs 187. It is also stated at 312, ed. Higgs 235, that ‘States who rise by trade do not fail to sink afterwards.’ The thesis of ‘growth and decay’ also features in Hume’s essay ‘Of Money’ and in a letter to Lord Kames, dated 4 March 1758, where he says that ‘Great empires, great cities, great commerce, all of them receive a check, not from accidental events, but necessary principles.’ (J. Y. T. Greig, The Letters of David Hume (Oxford, 1932), i.270–2.) The same thesis appears in Hutcheson, System, ii.377, where it is stated that states ‘have within them the seeds of death and destruction’. Sir James Steuart also uses the argument, Principles, i.224–5, ed. Skinner i.195–6, and see also Kame’s Sketches of the History of Man (Edinburgh, 1774), II.iv.

[54 ]See above, I.xi.n.1, where Spain and Portugal are described as the ‘two most beggarly countries in Europe’. It is suggested at IV.vii.c.82 that the colonies of these two countries may give more encouragement to the industry of others than to their own domestic output.

[55 ]Guicciardini, Della Istoria d’Italia (Venice, 1738), i.2. In LRBL ii.69–70, ed. Lothian 110, Guicciardini and Machiavelli are described as ‘the two most famous modern Italian historians’. Machiavelli was especially admired, being ‘of all modern Historians the only one who has contented himself with that which is the chief purpose of History, to relate events and connect them with their causes, without becoming a party on either side.’

[56 ]See above, II.v.14, and below, V.ii.f.6.

[a * ]See Brady’s historical treatise of Cities and Burroughs, p. 3, &c.a [For example: ‘. . . the Kings of England kept this Burg [Yarmouth] in their own Hands, and received by their Officers the Profits of the Port, until the time of King John, who in the 9th year of his Reign Granted the Burg in Fee–Farm to the Burgesses for ever, at the Rent of Fifty Five Pounds by the Year to be paid by the Provost or Bayliff of Yarmouth, and Granted they should yearly chuse a Bayliff amongst themselves, fit both to serve him, and themselves.’ After a number of similar instances from Domesday Brady continued, ‘By these instances we find the Burgesses or Tradesmen in great Towns, had in those times their Patrons under whose Protection they Traded, and paid an acknowledgement therefor, or else were in a more Servile Condition, as being in Dominio Regis vel aliorum, altogether under the power of the King, or other Lords, and it seems to me that then they Traded not, as being in any Merchant–Gild, Society and Community, but meerly under the Liberty and Protection given them by their Lords and Patrons, who probably might have Power from the King to Licence such a number in this or that Port, or Trading Town . . .’ (R. Brady, Cities and Boroughs, 3 and 16.)

[cc* ]See Madox Firma Burgi, p. 18, also History of the Exchequer, chap. 10. Sect. v. p. 223, first edition.c [‘The yearly profit which the King made of his Cities Towns or Burghs was commonly raised and paid to Him in a sundry manner . . . sometimes the King was pleased to demise or let his Town to the Townsmen thereof at Ferm, that is to say, either in Fee–ferm, or at Ferm for Years.’ But Madox does not suggest the development came necessarily from the farming of the poll tax. ‘The yearly Ferme of Towns arose out of certain locata or demised things that yielded Issues or profit. Insomuch that when a Town was committed to a Sherif Fermer or Custos, such Fermer or Custos well knew how to raise the Ferme out of the ordinary issues of the Towns, with an overplus of profit to himself.’ (T. Madox, Firma Burgi 18 and 251.) ‘From the reign of K. William I, down to the succeeding times, the King . . . used to let–out the several Counties of England upon a yearly Ferm or Rent concerted between the Crown and the Fermer, or else to commit them to Custody.’ (Madox, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (London, 1711), 223.) In Letter 115 addressed to Lord Hailes, dated 15 January 1769 Smith also described Madox’s work as the History of the Exchequer.]

[dd* ]See Madox Firma Burgi: See also Pfeffel in the remarkable events under Frederick II. and his successors of the house of Suabia.d [The heading ‘evénements remarquables sous Frédéric II’ is used by Pfeffel for several similar chapters. C. F. Pfeffel von Kriegelstein, Nouvel Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire et du droit publique d’Allemagne (Paris, 1766), i.284–307.]

[ee* ]See Madox.e [‘King John granted some of his Towns in Normandy, to wit, to Falaise, Danfront, and Caen, that they might have a Communa during his pleasure.’ (T. Madox, Firma Burgi, 35.)]

[ff* ]See Pfeffel.f

[ll* ]See Sandi Istoria Civile de Vinezia, Part 2. vol. 1. page 247, and 256.l [V. Sandi, Principj di Storia Civile della Republica de Venezia (Venice, 1755), part 2, i.258.]

[a]2–6

[c]2–6

[d]2–6

[e]2–6

[f]2–6

[l]2–6