After several years’ experience as a customs official, Adam Smith took the opportunity in his third edition (1784) of considerably enlarging the _Wealth of Nations_; and, among other important additions, he inserted at the end of Book IV. a new chapter, entitled “Conclusion of the Mercantile System.” It is a deeply instructive recital of the extremities of absurdity into which the British legislature had suffered itself to be led blindfold by a false theory and powerful interests. The encouragement of exportation, and the discouragement of importation, were the two great engines by which the mercantile system proposed to enrich every country; but with regard to some particular commodities, it followed an opposite plan: discouraging exports, and encouraging imports. Thus it penalised or prohibited the exportation of machinery, wool, and coal; nor was the living instrument, the artificer, allowed to go free. Two statutes had been passed in the reigns of George I. and II. to prevent any British artificer going abroad under penalty of being declared an alien, and forfeiting all his goods and chattels. “It is unnecessary, I imagine, to observe how contrary such regulations are to the boasted liberty of the subject, of which we affect to be so very jealous; but which, in this case, is so plainly sacrificed to the futile interests of our merchants and manufacturers.” Smith is very sarcastic about regulations whose “laudable motive” was to extend British manufactures, not by improving them, but by depressing those of our neighbours, and by putting an end as much as possible to the troublesome competition of such odious rivals. He then lays down a maxim “so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it”:— “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” This golden rule was everywhere violated by the mercantile system, which seemed to consider production the ultimate object of all industry. But the worst of all its inventions was the colonial monopoly. “In the system of laws which has been established for the management of our American and West Indian colonies, the interest of the home consumer has been sacrificed to that of the producer with a more extravagant profusion than in all our other commercial regulations.” If there was anything more odious to Adam Smith than a protective duty, it was the discriminating or preferential duty which had been invented for the purpose of tying up the trade between Great Britain and her colonies. Both his “Utopias” were projected for the express purpose of putting an end to a colonial system which he regarded as a dead weight upon both the mother country and her dependencies.