--- {207} The smaller a district, or an island is, the exports and imports will be the greater, when compared with the number of inhabitants. Take the exports and imports of all Europe, with the other quarters of the world;--considering Europe as one country, and it will not be found to amount to one shilling a person per annum. Take the amount in Britain, it will be found about forty shillings a person. Consider what is bought and sold by a single village, and it will be still greater than that; and, last of all, a single labouring family buys all that it uses, and sells all that it produces. And the meanest family, taken in this way, does proportionably =sic= more buying and selling than the richest state, taken in a body. Consider the whole earth as one state, and it neither exports nor imports. -=- [end of page #270] genious mechanics of the last century, (Mr. Vaucusson,) at the expense of that government, in which were nearly all the curious inventions brought forth in England, together with many not known in it. Some Englishmen, in going through it, brought over new inventions here, for which they obtained patents, and, by which, they, as well as the public, were gainers, while the inventions lay useless and dormant in France. Invention is not a thing in a man's power, and great inventions are generally more the effect of accident than of superior abilities; at any rate, no encouragement is certain to produce invention, but it always will produce improvement on invention. When a man has a patent for fourteen years, he does every thing in his power to make the object of that patent become as generally useful as possible, and this is only to be done by carrying the improvements as far as he is able. {208} Others, again, who have no patent, but are of the same trade, endeavour to preserve their business by improvement, and to this contest in excellence may be attributed the great progress, made in England, in bringing manufactures to a higher degree of perfection than in any other country. The great inventions, from which others branch out and spring, are not due, it has often been asserted, to natives of this country. Probably this may be owing to the circumstance, that they were known before the advancement of this country in any of the arts; but let that be as it may, there are a vast number of inventions carried to greater