The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where direc… - Adam Smith

If the importation of foreign cattle, for example, were made ever so free, so few could be imported, that the grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by it. Live cattle are, perhaps, the only commodity of which the transportation is more expensive by sea than by land.

Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.

The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.