themselves, in depreciating the value of both labour and capital. Up
to his time, however, it had been carried out in a very small degree.
The colonies were then few in number, but, those were heavily taxed,
as has been shown in the candid admission of _Joshua Gee_, that the
colonists carried home but one-fourth of the value of the commodities
they brought to the great market.[127] The system was then only in its
infancy. In India, the Company had but then first obtained the
concession of a right to act in the capacity of tax-gatherer for
Bengal. On this continent, the right thus to tax the colonists was
seriously contested, and _The Wealth of Nations_ had not been long
before the world before it came to be explicitly and successfully
denied. The tendency of the system was, however, so obvious to its
author, that he desired to warn his countrymen against the effort to
build up "colonies of customers," as unworthy of a great people, and
worthy only of "a nation of shopkeepers,"--and happy for them would it
have been had his advice been taken. It was not. From that day to the
present, every step has been in the direction against which he
cautioned them, as was shown in a former chapter, and from year to
year the people of England have become more and more the mere traders
in the products of the labours of other men, and more and more
compelled to seek "new markets," as did the Roman people,--the only
difference being that in every case the exhaustion has been
accomplished with a rapidity unparalleled in the annals of Rome, or of
the world. A century since, India was rich, and now her government,
collecting annually one-fifth of the whole value of the land, is
sustained only by means of a monopoly of the power to poison and
enslave the Chinese by means of a vile drug, and the poor Hindoo is
forced to seek for food in the swamps of Jamaica and Guiana. Half a
century since, Ireland had a highly cultivated society, with a press
that sent forth large editions of the most valuable and expensive