their marriages being late) we may here reckon eight, of which, if one half grow up, and our marriages are made, reckoning one with another, at twenty years of age, our people must at least be doubled every twenty years. 8. But notwithstanding this increase, so vast is the territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully, and till it is fully settled, labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues long a laborer for others, but gets a plantation of his own; no man continues long a journey man to a trade, but goes among those new settlers, and sets up for himself, &c. Hence labor is no cheaper now, in Pennsylvania, than it was thirty years ago, though so many thousand laboring people have been imported from Germany and Ireland. 9. The danger, therefore, of these colonies interfering with their mother country in trades, that depend on labor, manufactures, &c. is too remote to require the attention of Great Britain. 10. But, in proportion to the increase of the colonies, a vast demand is growing for British manufactures; a glorious market, wholly in the power of Britain, in which foreigners cannot interfere, which will increase, in a short time, even beyond her power of supplying, though her whole trade should be to her colonies. 12. It is an ill grounded opinion, that by the labor of slaves, America may possibly vie in cheapness of manufactures with Britain. The labor of slaves can never be so cheap here, as the labor of working men is in Britain. Any one may compute it. Interest of money is in the colonies from 6 to 10 per cent. Slaves, one with another, cost 30. sterling per head. Reckon then the interest of the first purchase of a slave, the insurance or risque on his life, his clothing and diet, expences in his sickness, and loss of time, loss by his neglect of business, (neglect is natural to the man, who is not to be benefited by his own care or diligence) expence of a driver to keep him at work, and his pilfering from time to time, almost every slave being, from the nature of slavery, a thief, and compare the whole amount with the wages of a manufacturer of iron or wool in England, you will see, that labor is much cheaper there than it ever can be by negroes here. Why then will Americans purchase slaves? Because slaves may be kept as long as a man pleases, or has occasion for their labor, while hired men are continually leaving their master (often in the midst. of his business) and setting up for themselves. § 8. 13. As the increase of people depends on the encouragement of marriages, the following things must diminish a nation, viz. 1. The being conquered; for the conquerors will engross as many offices, and exact as much tribute or profit on the labor of the conquered, as will maintain them in their new establishment; and this diminishing the substance of the natives discourages their marriages, and so gradually diminishes them, while the foreigners increase. 2. Loss of territory: thus the Britons, being driven into Wales, and crowded together in a barren country, insufficient to support such great numbers, diminished, till the people bore a proportion to the produce; while the Saxons increased on their abandoned lands, till the island became full of English. And, were the English now driven into Wales by some foreign nation, there would, in a few years, be no more Englishmen in Britain, than there are now people in Wales. 3. Loss of trade: manufactures, exported, draw subsistence from foreign countries for numbers, who are thereby enabled to marry and raise families. If the nation be deprived of any branch of trade, and no new employment is found for the people occupied in that branch, it will soon be deprived of so many people. 4. Loss of food: suppose a nation has a fishery, which not only employs great numbers, but makes the food and subsistence of the people cheaper: if another nation becomes master of the seas, and prevents the fishery, the people will diminish in proportion as the loss of employ and dearness of provision makes it more difficult to subsist a family. 5. Bad government and insecure property: people not only leave such a country, and, settling abroad, incorporate with other na tions, lose their native language, and become foreigners; but the industry of those that remain being discouraged, the quantity of subsistence in the country is lessened, and the support of a family becomes more difficult. So heavy taxes tend to diminish a people. 6. The introduction of slaves the negroes brought into the English sugar islands have greatly diminished the whites there; the poor are by this means deprived of employment, while a few families acquire vast estates, which they spend on foreign luxuries; and educating their children in the habit of those luxuries, the same income is needed for the support of one, that might have maintained one hundred. The whites, who have slaves, not laboring, are enfeebled, and therefore not so ge nerally prolific; the slaves being worked too hard, and ill fed, their constitutions are broken, and the deaths among them are more than the births; so that a continual supply is needed from Africa. The northern colonies, having few slaves, increase in whites. Slaves also pejorate the families that use them; the white children become proud, disgusted with labor, and, being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry. A 14. Hence the prince, that acquires new territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the natives to give his own people room; the legislator, that makes effectual laws for promoting of trade, increasing employment, improving land by more or better tillage, providing more food by fisheries, securing property, &c.-and the man that invents new trades, arts or manufactures, or new improvements in husbandry, may be properly called fathers of their nation, as they are the cause of the generation of multitudes, by the encouragement they afford to marriage. 15. As to privileges granted to the married, (such as the jus trium liberorum among the Romans) they may hasten the filling of a country, that has been thinned by war or pestilence, or that has otherwise vacant territory, but cannot increase a people beyond the means provided for their subsistence. 16. Foreign luxuries, and needless manufactures, import ed and used in a nation, do, by the same reasoning increase the people of the nation, that furnishes them, and diminish the people of the nation, that uses them. Laws, therefore, that prevent such importations, and, on the contrary, promote the exportation of manufactures to be consumed in foreign countries, may be called (with respect to the people that make them) generative laws, as, by increasing subsis tence, they encourage marriage. Such laws likewise strengthen a country doubly, by increasing its own people, and diminishing its neighbors. 17. Some European nations prudently refuse to consume the manufactures of East India :-they should likewise forbid them to their colonies; for the gain to the merchant is not to be compared with the loss, by this means, of people to the nation. 18. Home luxury in the great, increases the nation's manufactures employed by it, who are many, and only tends to diminish the families that indulge in it, who are few. The greater the common fashionable expence of any rank of people, the more cautious they are of marriage. There fore luxury should never be suffered to become common. 19. The great increase of offspring in particular families is not always owing to greater fecundity of nature, but sometimes to examples of industry in the heads, and industrious education, by which the children are enabled to provide bet ter for themselves, and their marrying early is encouraged from the prospect of good subsistence. 20. If there be a sect, therefore, in our nation, that regards frugality and industry as religious duties, and educate their children therein, more than others commonly do, such sect must consequently increase more by natural generation than any other sect in Britain. 21. The importation of foreigners into a country, that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people, unless the new-comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out.-Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country; for such vacancy (if the laws are good, § 14, 16) will soon be filled by natural generation. Who can now find the vacancy made in Sweden, France, or other warlike nations, by the plague of heroism 40 years ago; in France, by the expulsion of the Protestants; in England, by the settlement of her colonies; or in Guinea, by a hundred years exportation of slaves, that has blackened half America? The thinness of the inhabitants in Spain is owing to national pride, and idleness, and other causes, rather than to the expulsion of the Moors, or to the making of new settle ments. 22. There is, in short, no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of subsistence. Was the face of the earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sowed and overspread with one kind only, as for instance, with fennel; and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might, in a few ages, be replenished from one nation only, as for instance, with Englishmen. Thus there are supposed to be now upwards of one million of English souls in North America (though it is thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufactures at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in twentyfive years, will, in another century, be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation! What numbers of ships and seamen! We have been here but little more than a hundred years, and yet the force of our privateers in the late war, united, was greater, both in men and guns, than that of the whole British navy in queen Elizabeth's time. How important an affair then to Britain then is the present treatys 5 The treaty of Utrecht, in 1751. |
