"A fundamental maxim in the political economy, not of England only, but of all other commercial countries. The inland or home trade, the most important of all, the trade in which an equal capital affords the greatest revenue, and creates the greatest employment to the people of the country, was considered as subsidiary only to foreign trade. It neither brought money into the country, it was said, nor carried any out of it. The country, therefore, could never become richer or poorer by means of it, except as far as its prosperity or decay might indirectly influence the state of foreign trade." It was against this error chiefly that Dr. Smith cautioned his countrymen. He showed that it had led, and was leading, to measures tending to disturb the natural course of things in all the countries connected with England, and to produce among them a necessity, for trade while diminishing the power to maintain trade. "Whatever tends," says he, "to diminish in any country the number of artificers and manufacturers, tends to diminish the home market, the most important of all markets, for the rude produce of the land, and thereby still further to discourage agriculture," and consequently to diminish the power of producing things with which to trade. He nowhere refers to the fact that any system which looks to compelling a nation to export raw produce, tends necessarily to the impoverishment of the land and its owner, and to the diminution, of the freedom of the labourer, and yet that such was the case could scarcely have escaped his observation. The tendency of the then existing English policy was, as he showed, to produce in various countries a necessity for exporting every thing in its rudest form, thus increasing the cost of transportation, while impoverishing the land and exhausting the people. The legislature had been, he said, "prevailed upon" to prevent the establishment of manufactures in the colonies, "sometimes by high duties, and sometimes by absolute prohibitions." In Grenada, while a colony of France, every plantation had its own refinery of sugar, but on its cession to England they were all abandoned, and thus was the number of artisans diminished, to "the discouragement of agriculture." The course of proceeding relative to these colonies is thus described:-- "While Great Britain encourages in America the manufacturing of pig and bar iron, by exempting them from duties to which the like commodities are subject when imported from any other country, she imposes an absolute prohibition upon the erection of steel furnaces and slit-mills in any of her American plantations: She will not suffer her colonies to work in those more refined manufactures, even for their own consumption; but insists upon their purchasing of her merchants and manufactures all goods of this kind which they have occasion for.