Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry: Chiefly Intended to Promote the Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures, and Fisheries, of Scotland. In a Series of Letters to a Friend ...

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T. Cadell, 1777 - Agriculture and state - 526 pages
 

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Page 360 - The trade which is carried on between these two different sets of people, consists ultimately in a certain quantity of rude produce exchanged for a certain quantity of manufactured produce. The dearer the latter, therefore, the cheaper the former ; and whatever tends in any country to raise the price of manufactured produce, tends to lower that of the rude produce of the land, and thereby to discourage agriculture.
Page 359 - ... from agriculture a part of the capital which had before been employed in it, or hinders from going to it a part of what would otherwise have gone to it.
Page 376 - ... fertile fields, and will be content to give a certain premium for an exclusive privilege to cultivate them; which will be greater or smaller according to the more or less fertility of the soil. It is this premium which constitutes what we now call rent, a medium by means of which the expense of cultivating soils of very different degrees of fertility may be reduced to a perfect equality.
Page 192 - In the course of our road among the houses, we found at every one of them a little rill or gutter of running water ; if the...
Page 421 - Foíler'd thus, The cradled hero gains from female care His future vigour ; but that vigour felt, He fprings indignant from his nurfe's arms, He nods the plumy creft, he (hakes the fpear, And is that awful thing which Heav'n ordain'd The fcourge of tyrants, and his country's pride.
Page 193 - Then as every clothier must necessarily keep one horse, at least to fetch home his wool and his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spinners, his manufacture to the fulling-mill, and when finished to the market to be sold, and the like ; so everyone generally keeps a cow or two for his family.
Page 360 - ... which is carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. The inhabitants of the town draw from the country the rude produce, which constitutes both the materials of their work and the fund of their subsistence ; and they pay for this rude produce, by sending back to the country a certain portion of it manufactured and prepared for immediate use.
Page xxii - thou haft much goods laid up for " many years: take thine eafe, eat,
Page 355 - ... the nominal or money price of corn, you do not raise its real value, you do not increase the real wealth of our farmers or country gentlemen, you do not encourage the growth of corn. The nature of things has stamped upon corn a real value, which cannot be altered by merely altering its money price. Through the world in general, that value is equal to the quantity of labour which it can maintain.
Page 65 - Sterling, or upwards, on an acre of ground, before it could be put under crop, with any profpect of being repaid ? — yet this is no uncommon thing in that neighbourhood. Nor is this all : For to fuch a height is the fpirit for improvement rifen in that part of the world, that they are not only eager to cultivate thefe barren fields, but even purchafe thefe dreary waftes at a vaft expence for that purpofe.

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