It was against this system that Adam Smith cautioned his countrymen, as not only a violation of "the most sacred rights" of man, but as leading inevitably to consequences in the highest degree injurious to themselves, in depreciating the value of both labour and capital. Up to his time, however, it had been carried out in a very small degree. The colonies were then few in number, but, those were heavily taxed, as has been shown in the candid admission of _Joshua Gee_, that the colonists carried home but one-fourth of the value of the commodities they brought to the great market.[127] The system was then only in its infancy. In India, the Company had but then first obtained the concession of a right to act in the capacity of tax-gatherer for Bengal. On this continent, the right thus to tax the colonists was seriously contested, and _The Wealth of Nations_ had not been long before the world before it came to be explicitly and successfully denied. The tendency of the system was, however, so obvious to its author, that he desired to warn his countrymen against the effort to build up "colonies of customers," as unworthy of a great people, and worthy only of "a nation of shopkeepers,"--and happy for them would it have been had his advice been taken. It was not. From that day to the present, every step has been in the direction against which he cautioned them, as was shown in a former chapter, and from year to year the people of England have become more and more the mere traders in the products of the labours of other men, and more and more compelled to seek "new markets," as did the Roman people,--the only difference being that in every case the exhaustion has been accomplished with a rapidity unparalleled in the annals of Rome, or of the world. A century since, India was rich, and now her government, collecting annually one-fifth of the whole value of the land, is sustained only by means of a monopoly of the power to poison and enslave the Chinese by means of a vile drug, and the poor Hindoo is forced to seek for food in the swamps of Jamaica and Guiana. Half a century since, Ireland had a highly cultivated society, with a press that sent forth large editions of the most valuable and expensive books produced in England, and now her people are decimated by famine and pestilence. Twenty years since, there existed some little prospect that the poor negroes of Jamaica and Guiana might at some future time become civilized, but that hope has passed away, as has the value of the land upon which they have been employed. What has been the effect of this course of policy upon the condition of the people of England we may now inquire.