d the nations of
flesh and blood which exist around us, of which we form a part, and which
are immediately affected by ill-judged or inapplicable measures of
commercial regulation. Nations were planted by the hand of nature; they
were not sown, nor their place allotted by human foresight. They exist
often close to each other, and under apparently the same physical
circumstances, under every possible variety of character, age, and period
of growth. The difference even between those ruled by the same government,
and inhabited apparently by the same race, is prodigious. Who could
suppose that the Dutchman, methodical, calculating, persevering, was next
neighbour to the fiery, war-like, and impetuous Frenchman? Or that the
southern and western Irish, vehement, impassioned, and volatile, came from
the same stock which pervades the whole west of Britain? England, for
centuries the abode of industry, effort, and opulence, is subject to the
same government, and situated in the same latitude as Ireland, where
indolence is almost universal, wealth rare, and manufactures in general
unknown. Russia, ignorant, united, and ever victorious, adjoins Poland,
weak, distracted, and ever vanquished; and Prussia has risen with
unheard-of rapidity in national strength, and every branch of industry, at
the very time when Spain was fast relapsing into slavery and barbarism.

Familiar as these truths are to all they seem to have been, in an
unaccountable manner, forgotten by our modern political economists; and
the oblivion of them is the principal cause of the remarkable failure
which has attended the application to practice of all their theories. They
invariably forget the different age of nations; they overlook the
essential difference between communities with different national character,
or in different stages of manufacturing or commercial advancement, and
fall into the fatal error of supposing that one general system is to be
readily embraced by, and found applicable to, a cluster of nations
existing under every possible variety of physical, social, and political
circumstances. Fixing their eyes upon their own country, or rather upon
the peculiar interest to which they belong in their own country, they
reason as if all mankind were placed in the same circumstances, and would
be benefited by the arrangements which they find advantageous. They forget
that all nations were not planted at the same time, nor in the same soil;
that the differen