sell their goods
for a better price than if exposed to the free competition of all other
nations."

Let the two nations, between which the commercial treaty is made, be the
mother country and her colony, and Adam Smith, it is evident, admits,
that a mother country may be benefited by oppressing her colony. It
may, however, be again remarked, that unless the monopoly of the foreign
market be in the hands of an exclusive company, no more will be paid for
commodities by foreign purchasers than by home purchasers; the price
which they will both pay will not differ greatly from their natural
price in the country where they are produced. England, for example,
will, under ordinary circumstances, always be able to buy French goods,
at the natural price of those goods in France, and France would have an
equal privilege of buying English goods at their natural price in
England. But at these prices, goods would be bought without a treaty. Of
what advantage or disadvantage then is the treaty to either party?

The disadvantage of the treaty to the importing country would be this:
it would bind her to purchase a commodity, from England for example, at
the natural price of that commodity in England, when she might perhaps
have bought it at the much lower natural price of some other country. It
occasions then a disadvantageous distribution of the general capital,
which falls chiefly on the country bound by its treaty to buy in the
least productive market; but it gives no advantage to the seller on
account of any supposed monopoly, for he is prevented by the competition
of his own countrymen from selling his goods above their natural price;
at which he would sell them, whether he exported them to France, Spain,
or the West Indies, or sold them for home consumption.

In what then does the advantage of the stipulation in the treaty
consist? It consists in this: these particular goods could not have been
made in England for exportation, but for the privilege which she alone
had of serving this particular market; for the competition of that
country, where the natural price was lower, would have deprived her of
all chance of selling those commodities. This, however, would have been
of little importance, if England were quite secure that she could sell
to the same amount any other goods which she might fabricate, either in
the French market, or with equal advantage in any other. The object
which England has in view, is, for example, to buy