17 Essays 143 
great a profit thereon as if he had first turned the 
wheat into manufactures, by subsisting therewith the 
workmen while producing those manufactures; since 
there are many expediting and facilitating methods of 
working not generally known; and strangers to the 
manufactures, though they know pretty well the ex- 
pense of raising wheat, are unacquainted with those 
short methods of working, and thence being apt to 
suppose more labor employed in the manufactures 
than there really is, are more easily imposed on in 
their value, and induced to allow more for them than 
they are honestly worth.’ 
11. Thus the advantage of having manufactures in 
a country does not consist, as is commonly supposed, 
in their highly advancing the value of rough mate- 
rials, of which they are formed; since, though six 
pennyworth of flax may be worth twenty shillings 
when worked into lace, yet the very cause of its being 
worth twenty shillings is, that, besides the flax, it has 
cost nineteen shillings and sixpence in subsistence to 
I The reasons for paying a price are not founded merely upon a 
computation of the expense of production. A general knowledge of 
the expenses of producing a bushel of corn does not prevent the pro- 
ducer from demanding and the consumer from paying a higher price 
when the article is scarce; nor the consumer from offering and the 
producer from accepting a lower price when it is plenty. A proposi- 
tion bearing a near affinity to that stated in the text seems to be true, 
namely, that those things which are of general production and habitual 
consumption, like the common agricultural products, are more likely 
to bear a market price near to the cost of production, than things of 
less common production and less regular use, as the article of lace, 
mentioned in the next section. It may also be generally the case, that 
the greater the distance of the place of consumption from that of pro- 
duction, the longer an article is likely to be sold at a great profit, since 
the operation of competition, in bringing down the price, is likely to 
be slower.—W. PHILLIPS. 
4,69]