When the first edition of these letters was published, I was still in the distant country from which they were written. It is about two years, since that impression was exhausted: it is about a year and a half since this reimpression was compleated, the publication having been retarded till now by causes not worth mentioning. The alterations made in this second edition are few, and those merely verbal and of no importance. In this interval, had I heard of any objection, total or partial, I would have either admitted the force of it, or answered it: but I have not been able to meet with any. I have scarce heard of a reader who has not acknowledged himself convinced. The practical conclusion is the repealing of the laws against usury, together with those others that are here pointed out as depending on the same principle. That matters are at all the nearer to such a measure since the publication of this work than they were before, is more than I can pretend to have any ground for supposing: for in great political questions, wide indeed is the distance between conviction and practice. An intelligent Frenchman, of whom I have not been able to learn enough to distinguish him more particularly, published a few months since a translation he had made for his own amusement, a considerable time before the commencement of the Revolution, he says, not long after the work found its way to France. He kept back the translation, thinking the country not ripe for it. The general slaughter that has been made of all sorts of prejudices in that country may now, he thinks, have opened the way for it. But if its turning to any account in practice depends upon the overthrow of prejudice, who shall calculate the period, at which any good can be expected from it here?
It is to the attempt made in Ireland to effect a fresh forced reduction of the legal rate of interest in that country, that the reimpression there published must naturally have been indebted for a circulation proportionably more extensive than here. Between that measure and the laws condemned by this investigation, the connection is close and evident. Had the reduction so proposed been naturally productive of the advantage expected from it, and at the same time not attended with any additional hardship or other inconvenience superior to that advantage, such a reduction would then have had no other objections to combat than the objections, decisive as they are represented in this work, which apply to the original fixation. According to my conception of the matter, however, that advantage is altogether illusory; the measure is attended with hardships much more than sufficient to outweigh the advantage, were it real, and of these, several are distinct from, and superadded to, those which result from the impropriety of ever having fixed any rate at all. Had I divined the politico-economical advantage proposed from this ulterior and fresh reduction, I should have set it down among the reasons capable of being alledged in support of the original fixation: for the advantage, if it were one, of the proposed future reduction, must proportionably have resulted from the precedent ones. The fact is, I must confess, that in the situation I was then in, sequestered not less from political converse than from , this supposed advantage had equally escaped my recollection and my imagination as applicable to the original fixation, though recollection had represented it as capable of having been supposed to result from successive reductions. From newspapers I had learnt thus much, that in England a fresh reduction had lately been proposed, as tending some how or other to the benefit of trade: but the sound of the word trade being all I was able to collect, what that benefit was, or how it was to be brought about, was more than I could conceive. To apply it to the immediate subject I was treating of, it was necessary I should have some conception of the force of it: and unfortunately I was unable to perceive any force or meaning in it at all. It had equally escaped Dr Smith: for his reasons in support of the limitation of the rate of interest are confined to the discouragement of prodigals and projectors: of any supposed benefit to trade that was to follow from it in any other way, he betrays not the smallest suspicion: and blindness may be confessed without much shame, where eyes like Dr Smith's have failed to see. I little suspected, I must confess, that so many intelligent and ingenious men would so compleatly have mistaken a consequence for a cause. Instructed by the debates of the Irish Parliament. I now understand clearly what benefit was expected from it, but how that benefit was to flow from it is as much a mystery to me as ever. I will however avail myself now of that intelligence. By way of postscript, I have accordingly given a very short, but what appeared to me compleat, answer to the argument afforded by that supposed benefit to my system: and being thereby engaged to touch upon the measure of an ulterior reduction by which this supposed advantage was brought to view, I have stated such other considerations a appear to combat the propriety of that ulterior reduction, though not all of them applicable to the continuing of the rate at its present level.
As little can I pretend to say, whether a project of the same nature bas received any check from it in England. Infallibility is among the appendages of power: and if it be a dream, it is one of those which do not own themselves as such, and from which men are seldom thankful for being awaked. Several circumstances render probable that a project of this sort was not very long ago entertained: a positive assertion to that effect made in the Irish Parliament received no contradiction. Of late, nothing has been heard of it. The notion perhaps may be, that the country is not yet ripe for it. My notion is that no country ever was, or ever can be.
I do not pretend here to exhaust the subject, or to urge all that can be urged against the measure: nor to trace out to the last link the whole chain of its consequences. Such an undertaking would require more paper perhaps than it is worth, at any rate more time than at present I can spare. All I pretend to is to give what shall be sufficient to demonstrate its impolicy and injustice.
The propositions here given as conclusions from the decisive principle are, most of them, maintained by Dr Smith. The proposition here given as a principle itself is also laid down in the same admirable work: but without emphasis, and for any direct use that has been made of it, it might as well have not been there. Wide is the difference between a full view of a principle and a side glance. The principle which forms the basis of Locke's Essay is to be found, in so many words, in Aristotle: yet what was the world the better for it while it was in the hands of Aristotle, till Locke put it out to use? This same principle is also to be found, stated still more pointedly, in Lord Sheffield's elaborate and useful work. Yet what came of it? The whole work is full of advice as repugnant to that principle as it is to the doctrines of Dr Smith's that very which his Lordship quotes in those terms of respect which is its due, for the sake of stating almost the only doctrine in which the authority is in his favour, passing by the whole of what is against him, that is almost the whole contents of the as if they had not been there.
Colonies. Dr. Smith observes that, by the expence they have produced instead of revenue, they have been always hitherto worth so much less than nothing, and by the expence of wars waged for them, a hundred and so many millions less than nothing. What is his practical inference? that they should be given up? no: but that either they should be given up, or made to yield a revenue, which is impossible. The idea of giving them up is started -- but how? as the extremity of misfortune, the horrors of which should drive us into schemes for making them yield a revenue, as the only alternative common sense admitts of. We are to give them up: how? with the same emotions of regret, with which a man who found a necessity of retrenching, would lay down his equipage. The separation would be a misfortune not to us only, but to them. Why to them? because nothing but our superior wisdom and virtue could prevent their falling together by the ears. The event has not been favourable to this prophecy. Among these rebels, every thing breathes content and unanimity. Ill will there never has been: and the last spark of so much as a difference of opinion, patience has now finally extinguished. In the principal of our still loyal colonies, whose petitions for these six years we have not been able to find time to listen to, the discontent is as notorious as it is just. May it be effectual!
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