The fashionable doctrine of our day is, however, that the prosperity of a nation is to be measured by the amount of its trade with people, who are distant, as manifested by custom-house returns, and not by the quantity of exchanges among persons who live near each other, and who trade without the intervention of ships, and with little need of steamboats or wagons. If the trade of a neighbourhood be closed by the failure of a furnace or a mill, and the workman be thus deprived of the power to trade off the labour of himself or his children, or the farmer deprived of the power to trade off his food, consolation is found in the increased quantity of exports--_itself, perhaps, the direct consequence of a diminished ability to consume at home_. If canal-boats cease to be built, the nation is deemed to be enriched by the substitution of ocean steamers requiring fifty times the capital for the performance of the same quantity of exchanges. If the failure of mills and furnaces causes men to be thrown out of employment, the remedy is to be found, not in the revisal of the measures that have produced these effects, but in the exportation of the men themselves to distant climes, thus producing a necessity for the permanent use of ships instead of canal-boats, with diminished power to maintain trade, and every increase of this _necessity_ is regarded as an evidence of growing wealth and power. The whole tendency of modern commercial policy is to the substitution of the distant market for the near one. England exports her people to Australia that they may there grow the wool that might be grown at home more cheaply; and we export to California, by hundreds of thousands, men who enjoy themselves in hunting gold, leaving behind them untouched the real gold-mines--those of coal and iron--in which their labour would be thrice more productive. The reports of a late Secretary of the Treasury abound in suggestions as to the value of the distant trade. Steam-ships were, he thought, needed to enable us to obtain the control of the commerce of China and Japan. "With our front on both oceans and the gulf," it was thought, "we might secure this commerce, and with it, in time, command the trade of the world." England, not to be outdone in this race for "the commerce of the world," adds steadily to her fleet of ocean steamers, and the government contributes its aid for their maintenance, by the payment of enormous sums withdrawn from the people at home, and diminishing the home market to thrice the extent that it increases the foreign one. The latest accounts inform us of new arrangements about to be made with a view to competition with this country for the passenger traffic to and within the tropics, while the greatest of all trades now left to British ships is represented to be the transport of British men, women, and children, so heavily taxed at home for the maintenance of this very system that they are compelled to seek an asylum abroad.