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Diminish the real opulence either of Holland or of the territory

of Genoa, while the number of their inhabitants remains the same;

diminish their power of supplying themselves from distant

countries; and the price of corn, instead of sinking with that

diminution in the quantity of their silver, which must

necessarily accompany this declension, either as its cause or as

its effect, will rise to the price of a famine. When we are in

want of necessaries, we must part with all superfluities, of

which the value, as it rises in times of opulence and prosperity,

so it sinks in times of poverty and distress. It is otherwise

with necessaries. Their real price, the quantity of labour which

they can purchase or command, rises in times of poverty and

distress, and sinks in times of opulence and prosperity, which

are always times of great abundance; for they could not otherwise

be times of opulence and prosperity. Corn is a necessary, silver

is only a superfluity.