MRS. B

IN our last conversation we have in some measure digressed from our subject; but I trust that you have not forgotten all we have said upon the accumulation of capital. Let us now proceed to examine more specifically the various modes in which it may be employed in order to produce a revenue or income. Capital may be invested:

CAROLINE

Of all these ways of employing capital, agriculture, no doubt, must be the most advantageous to the country, as it produces the first necessaries of life.

MRS. B

In these northern climates it is almost as essential to our existence to be clothed and lodged as to be fed; and manufactures are, you know, requisite for these purposes.

CAROLINE

True; but then agriculture has also the advantage of furnishing the raw materials for manufactures; it is the earth which supplies the produce with which our clothes are made and our houses built.

MRS. B

Yet without manufactures these materials would not be produced; it is the demand of the manufacturer for such articles which causes them to be raised by the farmer; agriculture and manufactures thus re-act on each other to their mutual advantage.

CAROLINE

It may be so; but still it does not appear to me that they can be equally beneficial to the country. Manufactures do not, like agriculture, actually increase the produce of the earth; they create nothing new, but merely put together under another form the materials with which they are supplied by agriculture.