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the accumulation of stock. And thus it is that Dr. Smith attributes to the supporting of unproductive labor all those evils which are the result of prodigality and extravagance.

It is some indistinct idea of a connexion between the employment of productive laborers and the accumulation of capital which Dr. Smith entertains, where he tells us, that "a man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers, while every body knows that a man may waste his whole fortune in the purchase of manufactured commodities; and thus, far from growing rich, may ruin himself,-just by employing a multitude of manufacturers.”

The same confused ideas seem to have clouded our author's understanding, when he wrote the following sentences:

"Whatever part of his stock a man employs as a capital, he always expects it to be replaced to him with a profit. He employs it, therefore, in maintaining productive hands only. Whenever he employs any part of it in maintaining unproductive hands of any kind, that part is from that moment withdrawn from his capital, and placed in his stock received for immediate consumption."

If a person worth £1000, can employ it in two ways, he can either on the one hand, employ it as a capital, either directly, or through the medium of the bank; or, on the other hand, he can use it as a stock reserved for immediate consumption. In either of these ways I can employ it in supporting indifferently either productive or unproductive hands; and it does not appear that my success or my failure will be at all necessarily influenced by this circumstance. If I use it as a capital I may choose to embark it in some manu

facturing or mercantile speculation, and thus employ productive laborers; or I may become the manager of a theatre, and thus take into my service a number of unproductive hands. And this last scheme may be just as profitable, or even more so than the other.

On the other hand, I may use the whole of my fortune, or too great a part of it, as a stock reserved for immediate consumption; and, if I do so, I shall most certainly go to ruin, whether I spend it in the employment of productive or unproductive hands. In such a case it will not be the direction, but the amount of my expenditure, that will bring me to beggary.

But it may go far to demonstrate the absurdity of upholding the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, if we can show that one of those whom Dr. Smith most unequivocally sets down among his unproductive laborers, can be transferred without any change in his occupation from the service of the spendthrift to that of the capitalist; for we shall thus prove, first, that he has become a productive laborer, as Dr. Smith tells us, that "that part of the annual produce of the land and labor of any country which replaces a capital, never is immediately employed to maintain any but productive hands.' It pays the wages, he says, of productive labor only.

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Now, let us suppose, that a musical amateur has so impoverished himself by maintaining a full band of performers for his own entertainment, that he finds himself almost ruined by his extravagance; but that rather than give up this his favorite amusement, he resolves, with the wreck of his fortune, to set up an opera, and offers to retain in his professional capacity still, those per

formers who had hitherto ministered to his private enjoyment. And, we may suppose, still farther that they accept of his terms, and that matters go on so well, that he recruits his fortune by the profits of this speculation. There does not seem any thing very improbable in all this, the difficulty is to reconcile it with Dr. Smith's chapter.

These men are now supported by capital, and therefore are productive laborers; but they are musicians, and therefore are unproductive laborers. Again; they ruined their employer, and therefore a man may grow poor by employing unproductive laborers, but they have also again enriched their employer;-and therefore a man may accumulate capital by employing unproductive laborers.

There does not seem then to be any real distinction between productive and unproductive labor; and even supposing that there is, there seems to be no good reason for Dr. Smith's idea of a necessary connexion between the employment of unproductive labor and expenditure, or between that of productive labor and the accumulation of stock.

Dr. Smith seems to have gone on with the popular idea, that wealth consists only in material commodities, without much consideration; and the wonder is, not that in one or two instances his acute understanding has been misled, but that in by far the greater number he has so successfully succeeded in clearing away the mists of popular prejudice and error.

Even with regard to the definition of wealth, it seems to have been our author's own opinion, had he kept by it, that it was not confined to material objects. Had Dr. Smith but remembered

his own aphorism, that "every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life;" and had he, by his usual train of reasoning, generalized this proposition, by applying to the whole community what may be said of every one of its members, we should in all probability never have heard of productive or unproductive labor.

Every one must admire the acuteness and talent displayed in this Essay. More than common discernment was necessary to catch the author of the wealth of nations tripping; but still greater talent was required to detect the fallacy and expose the mistaken reasonings by which it was supported. A discovery, when made often, appears very simple and easy; but the mind which makes that discovery, and the process which leads to it, belong not to the common order, and may be far removed from vulgar apprehension.

Among his papers which were written about this time, are several fragments, on subjects of great importance; and while I feel deep regret that they are imperfect, I cannot throw aside even the fragments of such a mind. The first on Written Language, in which his object appears to have been to prove that it is of divine origin. This is a view of the subject not peculiar indeed to him, but still not usually adopted by philosophers, and philologists; though I confess it has long appeared to me the only tenable hypotheses. The employment of hieroglyphics, and the use of them to record facts of a certain kind, are easily accounted for; but the discovery of alphabetic writing is a

very different matter. The extraordinary simplicity of alphabetic characters, and their still more extraordinary power, render it improbable that they should be the discovery of chance, or the invention of a barbarous people: while the impossibility of arriving at any great degree of civilization or scientific advancement without them, supposes that the discovery must have preceded. If reason and language are the gifts of God, it is not going too far to say, that both are imperfect and very limited in their operation without the use of a written language. In order to preserve and authenticate a Divine revelation, a fixed medium of that revelation seems absolutely necessary; and, perhaps, it would not be difficult to suggest reasons amounting to a high probability, that when the law was given to Moses, the first knowledge of alphabetic writing, and the first specimen of it were then communicated. But this is not the place to pursue such an inquiry.

ON WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

The acknowledged priority of spoken to written language, appears to us a very decisive argument for the divine origin of the latter.

Among those who hold that language is a mere human invention, there have been two opinions,some maintaining that substantives, or the names of external objects would be the words first invented, and others holding that verbs or words expressive of the mutual relations of objects, must have existed anterior to these, as an individual would not think of naming an object, until he had

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