or the merit of labour, and who
impoverishes at once the landlord and the tenant. The land, say they, is
let to the Tacksman at sixpence an acre, and by him to the tenant at ten-
pence. Let the owner be the immediate landlord to all the tenants; if he
sets the ground at eight-pence, he will increase his revenue by a fourth
part, and the tenant's burthen will be diminished by a fifth.

Those who pursue this train of reasoning, seem not sufficiently to
inquire whither it will lead them, nor to know that it will equally shew
the propriety of suppressing all wholesale trade, of shutting up the
shops of every man who sells what he does not make, and of extruding all
whose agency and profit intervene between the manufacturer and the
consumer. They may, by stretching their understandings a little wider,
comprehend, that all those who by undertaking large quantities of
manufacture, and affording employment to many labourers, make themselves
considered as benefactors to the publick, have only been robbing their
workmen with one hand, and their customers with the other. If Crowley
had sold only what he could make, and all his smiths had wrought their
own iron with their own hammers, he would have lived on less, and they
would have sold their work for more. The salaries of superintendents and
clerks would have been partly saved, and partly shared, and nails been
sometimes cheaper by a farthing in a hundred. But then if the smith
could not have found an immediate purchaser, he must have deserted his
anvil; if there had by accident at any time been more sellers than
buyers, the workmen must have reduced their profit to nothing, by
underselling one another; and as no great stock could have been in any
hand, no sudden demand of large quantities could have been answered and
the builder must have stood still till the nailer could supply him.

According to these schemes, universal plenty is to begin and end in
universal misery. Hope and emulation will be utterly extinguished; and
as all must obey the call of immediate necessity, nothing that requires
extensive views, or provides for distant consequences will ever be
performed.

To the southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and
the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo or Sumatra: Of both
they have only heard a little, and guess the rest. They are strangers to
the language and the manners, to the advantages and wants of the people,
whose life they