Defence of Usury [30]
on the side of the individual in this strange competition, there is the most perfect and minute knowledge and information, which interest, the whole interest of a man's reputation and fortune, can ensure: on the side of the legislator, the most perfect ignorance. All that he knows, all that he can know, is, that the enterprize is a project, which, merely because it is susceptible of that obnoxious name, he looks upon as a sort of cock, for him, in childish wantonness, to shie at. -- Shall the blind lead the blind? is a question that has been put of old to indicate the height of folly: but what then shall we say of him who, being necessarily blind, insists on leading, in paths he never trod in, those who can see? It must be by some distinction too fine for my conception, if you clear yourself from the having taken, on another occasion, but on the very point in question, the side, on which it would be my ambition to see you fix. "What is the species of domestic industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual" (you say(30*)), "it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatsoever, and which would no where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. "To give the monopoly of the home market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must in almost all cases be either a useless or a hurtful regulation." -- Thus far you: and I add, to limit the legal interest to a rate at which the carriers on of the oldest and best established and least hazardous trades are always glad to borrow, is to give the monopoly of the money-market to those traders, as against the projectors of new-imagined trades, not one of which but, were it only from the circumstance of its novelty, must, as I have already observed, appear more hazardous than the old. These, in comparison, are but inconclusive topics. I touched upon them merely as affording, what appeared to me the only shadow of a plea, that could be brought, in defence of the policy I am contending against. I come back therefore to my first ground, and beg you once more to consider, whether, of all that host of manufactures, which we both exult in as the causes and ingredients of national prosperity, there be a single one, that could have existed at first but in the shape of a project. But, if a regulation, the tendency and effect of which is merely to check projects, in as far as they are projects, without any sort of tendency, as I have shewn, to weed out the bad ones, is defensible in its present state of imperfect efficacy, it should not only have been defensible, but much more worthy of our approbation, could the efficacy of it have been so far strengthened and compleated as to have opposed, from the beginning, an unsurmountable bar to all sorts of projects whatsoever: that is to say, if, stretching forth its hand over the first rudiments of society, it had confined us, from the beginning. to mud for our habitations, to skins for our cloathing, and to acorns for our food. I hope you may by this time be disposed to allow me, that we have not been ill served by the projects of time past. I have already intimated, that I could not see any reason why we should apprehend our being worse served by the projects of time future. I will now venture to add, that I think I do see reason, why we should expect to be still better and better served by these projects, than by those. I mean better upon the whole, in virtue of the reduction which experience, if experience be