第134章

It will often happen that the process will engage in it more than two societies.Thus, the society B might exchange wood with C, C might exchange iron with A, and A, coal with B.Similar principles would still, however, guide its progress, and similar effects result from it.While the exchanges were confined to commodities in no degree luxuries, an increased provision for future wants would result from them, and a general augmentation of the absolute capital of the societies receiving these new supplies, and quickening in them of the accumulative principle would be experienced.

They would in them all have the general effect of improvements, and would operate, in the case supposed last, in the same manner as would in B some discovery facilitating the transport of wood, in C some discovery facilitating the smelting iron, in A some discovery facilitating the mining for coal.

The fewer obstructions, therefore, that stood in the way of such transfers, the farther, in these cases, would the stock of instruments in those societies be carried towards the order A, as any obstruction that might occur would, on the contrary, have the effect of checking the progress towards the more quickly returning orders, and keeping them nearer the order Z.

The benefits to all parties, arising from such an interchange of commodities as we have described, would be liable to be interrupted by war or by legislative enactments.These disturbing causes we have afterwards shortly to advert to, but there is one arising from the progress of invention that may be properly noticed here.

As there are no limits to the inventive faculty, so no community can assure itself that any commodity which it now produces and exports to some other community, may not come to be produced in that community, and so be no longer exported there.It may be, for instance, that, to return to the supposed case we were just considering, in the society B, strata of coal are discovered so near the surface as to be as easily wrought as in A, and that the spirit of enterprise may there be sufficiently active, successfully to engage in the occupation of mining for them.In that case coals would there be procured for about five-sixths of the labor they had cost when brought from A.They would fall in relative value, the absolute capital of the society would be augmented, and profits proportionally increased.

But while in the society B, the effects of the progress of invention would be thus beneficial, in A they might operate prejudicially.No exportation of coals could now take place from A to B, for being necessarily very nearly at the same price in the one as in the other society, there would be nothing to pay the expense of transport.Iron then could no longer be paid for in coals, unless that commodity sold at a lower rate.To pay for it, coals must be sold at B for less, or some other commodity must be resorted to.

In the former case the society A would sustain a sensible loss, comparable to an increased difficulty in working its mines, and proportional diminution of the amount of its absolute capital.In the latter, though the loss might be less, it would nevertheless be real; for, by the supposition, coal was the only commodity exported, and It could only be so because it was the one bringing the best return.The necessity therefore of turning to some other article, implies the obtaining of a less return, and a consequent diminution of the absolute capital of the society, and, unless counterbalanced by the progress of improvement, or an increase in the strength of the effective desire of accumulation, a withdrawal from the reach of the accumulative principle of its members, of some portion of materials before within its grasp.