First, as to the nobility and gentry, they must of necessity
retrench their families and expenses, if excessive impositions are
laid upon all sorts of materials for consumption, from whence
follows, that the degree below them of merchants, shopkeepers,
tradesmen, and artisans, must want employment.
Secondly, as to the manufactures, high excises in time of peace are
utterly destructive to that principal part of England's wealth; for
if malt, coals, salt, leather, and other things, bear a great price,
the wages of servants, workmen, and artificers, will consequently
rise, for the income must bear some proportion with the expense; and
if such as set the poor to work find wages for labour or manufacture
advance upon them, they must rise in the price of their commodity,
or they cannot live, all which would signify little, if nothing but
our own dealings among one another were thereby affected; but it has
a consequence far more pernicious in relation to our foreign trade,
for it is the exportation of our own product that must make England
rich; to be gainers in the balance of trade, we must carry out of
our own product what will purchase the things of foreign growth that
are needful for our own consumption, with some overplus either in
bullion or goods to be sold in other countries, which overplus is
the profit a nation makes by trade, and it is more or less according
to the natural frugality of the people that export, or as from the
low price of labour and manufacture they can afford the commodity
cheap, and at a rate not to be undersold in foreign markets.
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