Against all the errors of the system, Dr. Smith, however, raised in vain his warning voice. "England's treasure" was, it was thought, to be found "in foreign trade," and every measure adopted by the government had in view the extension of that trade. With each new improvement of machinery there was a new law prohibiting its export. The laws against the export of artisans were enforced, and a further one prohibited the emigration of colliers. The reader will readily see that a law prohibiting the export of cotton or woollen machinery was precisely equivalent to a law to compel all the producers of wool or cotton to seek the distant market of England if they desired to convert their products into cloth. The inventors of machinery, and the artisans who desired to work it, were thus deprived of freedom of action, in order that foreigners might be made the slaves of those who controlled the spinning-jenny, the loom, and the steam-engine, in whose hands it was desired to centralize the control of the farmers and planters of the world. England was to be made "the workshop of the world," although her people had been warned that the system was not only unnatural, but in the highest degree unjust, and even more impolitic than unjust, because while tending to expel capital and labour from the great and profitable home market, it tended greatly to the "discouragement of agriculture" in the colonies and nations subjected to the system, and to prevent the natural increase of the smaller and less profitable distant market upon which she was becoming more and more dependent.