(^308) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
Conscious of the injustice here, Smith condemned it as "a
manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind." But in view
of the economic circumstances of the colonies, he found these
measures not "very hurtful." "Land is still so cheap, and,
consequendy, labour so dear among them, that they can import from
the mother country, almost all the more refined or more advanced
manufactures cheaper than they could make them for themselves."
The prohibitions, then, did not make that much difference. Even
before these prohibitions had been instituted, he argues,
... a regard to their own interest would, probably, have prevented them
from doing so. In their present state of improvement, those prohibitions,
perhaps, without cramping their industry, or restraining it from any em
ployment to which it would have gone of its own accord, are only imperti
nent badges of slavery imposed upon them, without any sufficient reason, by
the groundless jealousy of the merchants and manufacturers of the mother
country. In a more advanced state they might be really oppressive and in
supportable.
"Probably"; "perhaps"; "badges of slavery." Indeed. Smith should
have known better. If the British could make and sell these things for
less, delivered in New England, they did not need the prohibitions,
and the colonists would have found better things to do. This is what
they had found, said Smith, who without talking about comparative
advantage understood and advocated the principle that resources
should go to the most profitable employment:
It has been the principal cause of the rapid progress of our American
colonies towards wealth and greatness, that almost their whole capitals have
hitherto been employed in agriculture. They have no manufactures, those
household and coarser manufactures excepted which necessarily accompany
the progress of agriculture, and which are the work of the women and chil
dren in every private family.^32
Fortunately for the later United States of America, the colonists did
indeed have manufactures, and Alexander Hamilton and others
understood that today's comparative advantage may not be
tomorrow's.
As for the supportability of these British constraints and
impositions, Smith might have rested his argument better on the
inefficiency of British enforcement. The whole system was a bad
joke. London was trying to impose constraints on colonial trade
using a handful of agents. Most of these lolled about in England
nora
(Nora)
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