4s Benjamin Franklin [1760 
gether, and settle in a foreign land. Some of the 
idle and drunken may be enticed away; but these 
only disappoint their employers, and serve to dis- 
courage the undertaking. If by royal munificence, 
and an expense that the profits of the trade alone 
would not bear, a complete set of good and skilful 
hands are collected and carried over, they find so 
much of the system imperfect, so many things want- 
ing to carry on the trade to advantage, so many 
difficulties to overcome, and the knot of hands so 
easily broken by death, dissatisfaction, and deser- 
tion, that they and their employers are discouraged 
together, and the project vanishes into smoke. 
Hence it happens that established manufactures 
are hardly ever lost, but by foreign conquest, or by 
some eminent interior fault in manners or govern- 
ment—a bad police oppressing and discouraging the 
workmen, or religious persecutions driving the sober 
and industrious out of the country. There is, in 
short, scarce a single instance in history of the con- 
trary, where manufactures have once taken firm 
root. They sometimes start up in a new place; but 
are generally supported, like exotic plants, at more 
expense than they are worth for any thing but 
curiosity, until these new seats become the refuge 
of the manufacturers driven from the old ones. 
The conquest of Constantinople, and final reduc- 
tion of the Greek empire, dispersed many curious 
manufacturers into different parts of Christendom. 
The former conquests of its provinces had before 
done the same. The loss of liberty in Verona, Milan, 
Florence, Pisa, Pistoia, and other great cities of 
LG