States, on the other hand, afford a better market for manufactured goods than any other country of equal population on the globe; because the universal prosperity of the community enables them to consume more. If the relation of cause and effect in this proposition be reversed, so as to say that the people consume more because they produce more, it will amouņt to the same thing, and be equally favorable for the purposes of the argument. More wealth is created, more is consumed, and the amount of enjoyment is thereby increased.

Unquestionably, we pay a somewhat higher price for our manufactured goods, as a return for the privilege of manufacturing them at home, and thereby having a field of employment for our skilled labor. But what does this tax amount to? The average duty levied by the present tariff on our chief articles of import is less than thirty per cent. But as one of the chief objects of a protective duty is to guard against the injurious fluctuation of prices in foreign markets, whereby we might be deluged with imported goods one year, and be very scantily supplied with them the next, the duty is fixed with reference to the lowest price at which they are ever sold abroad, and not with reference to the average price. The effect of a protective duty of thirty per cent, then, at the utmost, is to raise the average price fifteen per cent.

Whenever we have occasion for any of these small articles, we are obliged to spend a dollar for what might be obtained for eighty-five cents, if we would buy of foreigners; that is, we might save this fifteen cents, if we were willing to give up all our home manufactures, all opportunity for earning high wages by the exhibition of skill and ingenuity, and to confine the whole people to the comparatively rude pursuits of agriculture, thereby overstocking the market with food, and reducing the gains of farmers all over the country. Ireland has acted upon this rule, laid down by most political economists, always to buy in the cheapest market, whatever may be the effect upon domestic enterprise. Grain and other provision can be raised most cheaply in Ireland, owing to the low rate of wages there; manufactures can be produced to best advantage in England, owing to the abundance of English capital. Ireland, therefore, raises food to buy English manufactures with; and the present condition of the Irish people is the consequence. They have

the advantage, it is true, of the offer of the manufactured goods at prices fifteen per cent less than what they command in America;- an advantage which would be more sensibly felt, if the Irish were not too poor to purchase them at any price.

The proposition, I think, can be laid down as a general one, that a country, the population of which is chiefly or altogether devoted to agriculture, cannot become wealthy, whatever may be the fertility of its soil or the favorableness of its situation. Of course, its inhabitants must buy manufactures with food; that is, they must exchange the products of rude labor for the products of skilled labor; that is, again, they must give the labor of three persons for the labor of one person. The general principle of economical science is, to cause the industry of a country to take that direction in which it can be applied to the greatest advantage. Now the fertility of the soil is one advantage, and the capacity of the people for the higher departments of labor, their skill and enterprise, is another. There is no reason for allowing either of these advantages to remain latent or unworked; and in choosing between them, we are to be decided by their comparative amount and importance. Fortunate as this country is in the extent of its territory and the richness of its soil, this advantage is as nothing, - nay, it would turn out to our positive detriment, — if, in consideration of it, we should sacrifice the talents and the energies of our people,—if we should doom our whole population to the rude labor of turning up the earth, for the sake of the trifling advantage of purchasing our manufactured goods at a little lower price.

Even Adam Smith remarks,* that "A small quantity of manufactured produce purchases a great quantity of rude produce. A trading and manufacturing country, therefore, naturally purchases, with a small part of its manufactured produce, a great part of the rude produce of other countries; while, on the contrary, a country without trade and manufactures is generally obliged to purchase, at the expense of a great part of its rude produce, a very small part of the manufactured produce of other countries. The one exports what can subsist and accommodate but a very few, and imports the subsistence and

* Wealth of Nations, Book IV. Chap. IX.

accommodation of a great number. The other exports the accommodation and subsistence of a great number, and imports that of a very few only. The inhabitants of the one must always enjoy a much greater quantity of subsistence than what their own lands, in the actual state of their cultivation, could afford. The inhabitants of the other must always enjoy a much smaller quantity."

One mode in which the encouragement of skilled labor, leading to the interfusion of manufactures and commerce with agriculture, favors the increase of national capital, is, by concentrating the population in cities and towns. Agriculture is necessarily diffusive in its effects; the laborers must be distributed over the whole face of the territory which they cultivate. A few large cities spring up at great distances from each other, as an outlet for the commerce created by the exchange of the surplus agricultural products for manufactured goods and other necessaries brought from abroad. The great agricultural districts of Continental Europe, the wheat-plains of Poland and Southern Russia, find an outlet at the cities of Dantzic and Odessa; and we may remark in passing, that the poverty and general low condition of the inhabitants of these districts show the effects of confining a whole population to the rude labor of tilling the ground. It may be, that, from their low capacity, and their want of education and general intelligence, they are incapable of anything better. If so, the fact only strengthens our argument; wherever the capacity exists, if it be not developed, if a field of employment be not offered to it, the same results must follow. Manufactures and commerce, on the other hand, requiring a great division of labor, and also that the participators in the work should be near each other, necessarily create a civic population. They will only flourish in cities and towns, and they are the only means of creating cities and towns.

This principle, perhaps sufficiently obvious in itself, is strikingly illustrated by the differences among the States of this Union. Our Southern and Southwestern States are almost exclusively agricultural; and south of the northern boundary of Virginia and Kentucky, there is but one city, New Orleans, of the first class, numbering over 100,000 inhabitants, and but two cities of the second class, Charleston and Louisville, each

numbering over 40,000. These cities, of course, have sprung up from the same causes which sustain Dantzic and Odessa; they afford an outlet for the surplus produce of the vast agricultural districts which depend upon them; manufactures have hardly contributed at all to their growth. If we reckon as civic population those only who dwell in cities or towns having at least 11,000 inhabitants each, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, two manufacturing States, with an aggregate population of only 1,142,059, have a greater civic population than these ten agricultural States, who number in the aggregate over eight millions. The civic population of the two manufacturing States is nearly one third of their whole number; that of the ten agricultural States is about one twenty-fifth of the whole. The cities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have been created almost entirely by manufacturing enterprise, these States not being remarkable for surplus agricultural produce. Wherever there is a considerable fall of water, affording power to move machinery, there a new city springs up, though the soil in the neighborhood should be as barren as the desert of Sahara. But, under the demand for agricultural produce created by that city, the dry sand and the hard rock are converted into gardens of fruit and vegetables; while the plain of Eastern Virginia, once almost unsurpassed for fertility, its powers being now exhausted, is relapsing in part into its primitive wild condition.

Cities and towns are the great agents and tokens of the increase of national opulence, and the progress of civilization. The revival of effective industry, which preceded, and in part caused, the revival of learning in Europe, took place through the agency of the free towns and great trading cities, which sprang up most numerously in Germany and Italy, where they afforded a refuge for the arts and the pursuits of peace. Their establishment was the first effective blow given to the feudal institutions of the Continent. Commerce and manufactures, to which their walls afforded protection against the chances of war and the rapacity of the warlike nobles, "gradually introduced order and good government, 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 neighbors, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. By affording a great and ready market for the rude

produce of the country, they gave encouragement to its cultivation and further improvement." The word civilization itself, as if to indicate the origin and home of the thing, is derived from civis, the inhabitant of a city. Sismondi attributes the greater humanizing and civilizing influence of the colonies of the ancients over those of the moderns to the fact that the former founded cities, while the latter spread themselves over much land. In the town, man is in the presence of man, not in solitude, abandoned to himself and his passions. The history of the colonization of the borders of the Mediterranean, he says, might also be called the history of the civilization of the human race.

The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans successively formed colonies upon the same general plan. Each of these nations became in succession the leaders, the masters, of the civilized world, in refinement, learning, and the arts; and the colonies which they established were the means of diffusing these blessings among the rude tribes within whose territories the new settlements were formed. When the mother country became too populous, when the inhabitants of its wallinclosed cities became straitened for room, detachments of them were sent out to found new homes for themselves on the coasts of other lands. The colony was to take care of itself, to be independent of the mother country, from the outset. Hence, to protect themselves against the savage tribes among whom they came to dwell, they were obliged, as the first step, to build a city and encircle it with fortifications. Within its walls they all slept; and they did not wander so far from its precincts during the daytime, but that they could at any hour hear the trumpet-call, which, like the alarm-bell of modern times, might summon them back to the defence of the walls. Hence they cultivated only a narrow territory, lying within sight of, or at a short distance from, the city; and to obtain food from this restricted space for their whole number, they were obliged to exhaust all the arts of cultivation upon it; it was tilled, and it bloomed, like a garden. For greater secu rity, a portion of it was generally inclosed within the fortifications. This pomarium, or cultivated space under the walls, was usually divided into small strips, and allotted to the several heads of families among the citizens. A portion of the