Excessive Speculation Leading to Payment Problems

⁸⁶ The difficulty and irregularity of payment from the colonies to Great Britain have not been proportional to the balances due from them.

Generally, payments were more regular from the northern colonies than from the tobacco colonies.

• The northern colonies have generally paid a pretty large balance in money.
• The tobacco colonies have paid no balance or a much smaller one.

The difficulty of getting payment from our sugar colonies is due to:

• their uncultivated land, and not so much to the huge balances due.
• the planters’ temptation in overtrading, or of settling and planting in more waste land than what their capitals can afford.

The big island of Jamaica still has much uncultivated land.

• The smaller islands of Barbados, Antigua, and Saint Kitts have been completely cultivated.

In general, the returns from Jamaica have been more irregular and uncertain than those from those smaller islands.

• Those small islands have afforded less field for the planter’s speculations.

The new acquisitions of Grenada, Tobago, St. Vincents, and Dominica have opened a new field for such speculations.

• The returns from those islands have been recently as irregular and uncertain as those from Jamaica.

⁸⁷ It is not the poverty of the colonies which creates the present scarcity of gold and silver money.

Their great demand for active and productive stock:

• makes it convenient for them to have as little dead stock as possible
• disposes them to be content with a cheaper but less commodious instrument of commerce than gold and silver

They are thereby enabled to convert the value of that gold and silver into:

• the instruments of trade,
• clothing materials,
• household furniture,
• ironworks for building and extending their settlements and plantations.

In businesses which can only be transacted with gold and silver money, they can always find the needed quantity of those metals.

• If they do not find it, their failure is generally the effect of their unnecessary and excessive enterprise, not of their necessary poverty.
• It is not because they are poor that their payments are irregular and uncertain, but because they are too eager to become excessively rich.

If all the proceeds of the colony taxes, exceeding what was needed to pay their own civil and military establishments, were remitted to Great Britain in gold and silver, the colonies would have all the means to buy those needed metals.

In this case, they would be obliged to buy dead stock with their surplus produce instead of active and productive stock.

In transacting their domestic business, they would be obliged to employ a more costly instrument of commerce.

• The expence of buying this costly instrument might dampen the vivacity and ardour of their excessive enterprise in land improvement.

It might be unnecessary to remit any part of the American revenue in gold and silver.

It might be remitted in bills drawn on and accepted by particular merchants or companies in Great Britain to whom some of America’s surplus produce was consigned.

Those merchants and companies would pay into the treasury the American revenue in money after receiving the value of those goods.

The whole business might frequently be transacted without exporting a single ounce of gold or silver from America.