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mechanical skill, implements of trade, raw materials, and the necessary subsistence of those engaged in industry, until the completion and sale of their products. Otherwise, instead of founding a city, a mere scaffolding is run up, which must soon fall to the ground, because it rests upon no solid foundation. This was the case with regard to Ecatherinoslaw, in the Crimea; and was, indeed, foreseen by the emperor Joseph II., who assisted at the ceremony of its foundation, and laid the second stone in due form: "The empress of Russia and myself," said he to his suite, "have completed a great work in a single day: she has laid the first stone of a city, and I have laid the finishing one."

Nor will capital alone suffice to set in motion the mass of industry and the productive energy necessary to the formation and aggrandizement of a city, unless it present also the advantages of locality and of beneficent public institutions. The local position of Washington, it should seem, is adverse to its progress in size and opulence; for it has been outstripped by most of the other cities of the Union; (1) whereas, Palmyra, in acient times, grew both wealthy and populous, though in the midst of a sandy desert, solely because it had become the entrepot of commerce between Europe and eastern Asia. The same advantage gave importance and splendour to Alexandria, and, at a still more remote period, to Egyptian Thebes. The mere will of a despot could never have made it a city of a hundred gates, and of the magnitude and populousness recorded by Herodotus. Its grandeur must have been owing to its vicinity to the Red Sea and the channel of the Nile, and to its central position between India and Europe. (a.)

If a city can not be raised, neither does it seem, that its further aggrandizement can be arrested by the mere fiat of the monarch. Paris continued to increase, in defiance of abundance of

(a) There is some stretch of imagination in this. Probably the Egyptian Thebes was itself the centre of manufacture and commerce in its day, and not its entrepot; indeed, there is no reason to suppose a very active intercourse between India and Europe to have existed at so early a period; and, if it had, Thebes would hardly have been the entrepot. But central India furnishes itself instances of cities containing as large a population. Nineveh and Babylon seem to have been quite as populous; each was probably the central point of an enormous domestic industry. T.

(1) [The local position of Washington, perhaps, is not as advantageous as that of some of the other cities of the Union; it certainly, however, has not been adverse to its progress in population and wealth. In the year 1800, when Washington became the seat of the general government, its whole population amounted to 3210; according to the census, it contained in 1810, 8,208 inhabitants, in 1820, 13,247 inhabitants, and in 1830, 18,827 inhabitants. In the year 1820 the whole number of buildings was 2,208, of which 925 were of brick. By the assessment valuation of the year 1830, the whole number of buildings was 3,125. It can not therefore, be said to have been outstripped by most of the other cítics in the progress of improvement.] AMERICAN EDITOR,

regulations issued by the government of the day to limit its extension. The only effectual barrier is that opposed by natural causes, which it would be very difficult to define with precision, for it consists rather of an aggregate of little inconveniences, than of any grand or positive obstruction. In overgrown cities, the municipal administration is never well attended to; a vast deal of valuable time is lost in going from one quarter to another the crossing and jostling is immense in the central parts: and the narrow streets and passages, having been calculated for a much smaller population, are unequal to the vast increase of horses, carriages, passengers, and traffic of all sorts. This evil is felt most seriously at Paris, and accidents are growing more frequent every day; yet new streets are now building on the same defective plan, with a certain prospect of a like inconvenience in a very few years hence.

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BOOK III.

OF THE CONSUMPTION OF WEALTH.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF CONSUMPTION.

In the course of my work, I have frequently been obliged to anticipate the explanation of terms and notions which in the natural order, should have been postponed to a later period of the investigation. Thus I was obliged in the first book to explain the sense, in which I used the term, consumption, because production can not be effected without consumption.

My reader will have seen from the explanation there given, that, in like manner as by production is meant the creation, not of substance but of utility, so by consumption is meant the destruction of utility, and not of substance, or matter. When once the utility of a thing is destroyed, there is an end of the source and basis of its value;-an extinction of that, which made it an object of desire and of demand. It thenceforward ceases to possess value, and is no longer an item of wealth.

Thus, the terms, to consume to destroy the utility, to annihilate the value of any thing, are as strictly synonymous as the oppoposite terms to produce, to communicate utility, to create value, and convey to the mind precisely the same idea. Consumption, then, being the destruction of value, is commensurate, not with the bulk, the weight, or the number of the products consumed, but with their value. Large consumption is the destruction of large value, whatever form that value may happen to have assumed.

Every product is liable to be consumed; because the value, which can be added to, can likewise be subtracted from, any object. If it has been added by human exertion or industry, it may be subtracted by human use, or a variety of accidents. But it can be more than once consumed; value once destroyed can not be destroyed a second time. Consumption is sometimes

rapid, sometimes gradual. A house, a ship, an implement of iron, are equally consumable as a loaf, a joint of meat, or a coat. Consumption again may be but partial. A horse, an article of furniture, or a house when re-sold by the possessor, has been but partially consumed; there is still a residue of value, for which an equivalent is received in exchange on the re-sale. Sometimes consumption is involuntary, and either accidental, as when a house is burnt, or a vessel shipwrecked, or contrary tothe consumer's intention, as when a cargo is thrown overboard, or stores set on fire to prevent their falling into enemies' hands.

Value may be consumed, either long after its production, or at the very moment, and in the very act of production, as in the case of the pleasure afforded by a concert, or theatrical exhibition. Time and labour may be consumed; for labour, applicable to an useful purpose, is an object of value, and when once consumed, can never be consumed again.

Whatever can not possibly lose its value is not liable to consumption. A landed estate can not be consumed; but its annual productive agency may; for when once that agency has been exerted, it can not be exerted again. The improvements of an estate may be consumed, although their value may possibly exceed that of the estate itself; for these improvements are the effect of human exertion and industry; but the land itself is inconsumable.*

So likewise it is with any industrious faculty. One may consume a labourer's day's work but not his faculty of working; which however, is liable to destruction by the death of the person possessing it.

All products are consumed sooner or later; indeed they are produced solely for the purpose of consumption, and, whenever the consumption of product is delayed after it has reached the point of absolute maturity, it is value inert and neutralized for the time. For as all value may be employed re-productively, and made to yield a profit to the possessor, the withholding a product from consumption is a loss of the possible profit, in other words, of the interest its value would have yielded, if usefully employed.†

Some materials are capable of receiving and discharging the same kind of value many times over; as linen, which will undergo repeated washing. The cleanliness given it by the laundress, is a value wholly consumed on each occasion, along with a part of that of the linen itself.

The values not consumed sooner or later in a useful way are of little moment; such are provisions spoiled by keeping, products lost accidentally, and those whose use has become obsolete, or which have never been used at all, owing to the failure of the demand for them, wherein value origi nates. Values buried, or concealed, are commonly withdrawn but for a time from consumption; when found, it is always the interest of the finder to turn them to account, which he can not do without submitting them to consumption. In this case, the only loss is that of the profit derivable from

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