The common seamen, common soldiers, labouring people, and out-servants, cottagers, paupers, and their families, with the vagrants, make up the number of 2,825,000 heads.

In all 5,500,520 heads.

So that here seems a majority of the people, whose chief dependence and subsistence is from the other part, which majority is much greater, in respect of the number of families, because 500,000 families contribute to the support of 850,000 families.  In contemplation of which, great care should be taken not to lay new duties upon the home consumption, unless upon the extremest necessities of the State; for though such impositions cannot be said to fall directly upon the lower rank, whose poverty hinders them from consuming such materials (though there are few excises to which the meanest person does not pay something), yet indirectly, and by unavoidable consequences, they are rather more affected by high duties upon our home-consumption than the wealthier degree of people, and so we shall find the case to be, if we look carefully into all the distinct ranks of men there enumerated.

First, as to the nobility and gentry, they must of necessity retrench their families and expenses, if excessive impositions are laid upon all sorts of materials for consumption, from whence follows, that the degree below them of merchants, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans, must want employment.

Secondly, as to the manufactures, high excises in time of peace are utterly destructive to that principal part of England’s wealth; for if malt, coals, salt, leather, and other things, bear a great price, the wages of servants, workmen, and artificers, will consequently rise, for the income must bear some proportion with the expense; and if such as set the poor to work find wages for labour or manufacture advance upon them, they must rise in the price of their commodity, or they cannot live, all which would signify little, if nothing but our own dealings among one another were thereby affected; but it has a consequence far more pernicious in relation to our foreign trade, for it is the exportation of our own product that must make England rich; to be gainers in the balance of trade, we must carry out of our own product what will purchase the things of foreign growth that are needful for our own consumption, with some overplus either in bullion or goods to be sold in other countries, which overplus is the profit a nation makes by trade, and it is more or less according to the natural frugality of the people that export, or as from the low price of labour and manufacture they can afford the commodity cheap, and at a rate not to be undersold in foreign markets.  The Dutch, whose labour and manufactures are dear by reason of home excises, can notwithstanding sell cheap abroad, because this disadvantage they labour under is balanced by the parsimonious temper of their people; but in England, where this frugality is hardly to be introduced, if the duties upon our