tection, and to this he has a _claim_.

The moment that government appears at market, all the principles of
market will be subverted. I don't know whether the farmer will suffer by
it, as long as there is a tolerable market of competition; but I am
sure, that, in the first place, the trading government will speedily
become a bankrupt, and the consumer in the end will suffer. If
government makes all its purchases at once, it will instantly raise the
market upon itself. If it makes them by degrees, it must follow the
course of the market. If it follows the course of the market, it will
produce no effect, and the consumer may as well buy as he wants;
therefore all the expense is incurred gratis.

But if the object of this scheme should be, what I suspect it is, to
destroy the dealer, commonly called the middle-man, and by incurring a
voluntary loss to carry the baker to deal with government, I am to tell
them that they must set up another trade, that of a miller or a
meal-man, attended with a new train of expenses and risks. If in both
these trades they should succeed, so as to exclude those who trade on
natural and private capitals, then they will have a monopoly in their
hands, which, under the appearance of a monopoly of capital, will, in
reality, be a monopoly of authority, and will ruin whatever it touches.
The agriculture of the kingdom cannot stand before it.

A little place like Geneva, of not more than from twenty-five to thirty
thousand inhabitants,--which has no territory, or next to none,--which
depends for its existence on the good-will of three neighboring powers,
and is of course continually in the state of something like a _siege_,
or in the speculation of it,--might find some resource in state
granaries, and some revenue from the monopoly of what was sold to the
keepers of public-houses. This is a policy for a state too small for
agriculture. It is not (for instance) fit for so great a country as the
Pope possesses,--where, however, it is adopted and pursued in a greater
extent, and with more strictness. Certain of the Pope's territories,
from whence the city of Rome is supplied, being obliged to furnish Rome
and the granaries of his Holiness with corn at a certain price, that
part of the Papal territories is utterly ruined. That ruin may be traced
with certainty to this sole cause; and it appears indubitably by a
comparison of their state and condition with that of the other part of
the ecclesiastical d