Excerpt from An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth: And on the Sources of Taxation The causes of the varying wealth and poverty of nations have naturally at all times attracted the eager attention of mankind. For a long time, however, it was thought that there was nothing in the subject very difficult to understand: that the only way for a people to get rich was to procure money or bullion, and that the only way to get poor was to part with them. The art of enriching nations obviously consisted, therefore, in devising the means, first, of getting possession of as much of the precious metals as possible, and then, of holding them fast so as to keep the heap ever growing. It is in the different measures, or rather systems of measures, successively adopted to effect these purposes, that we must trace the rude but very decided political economy of the ages which elapsed between the conquest of England and the middle of the last century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.