Unprejudiced men well know, that all the penal and prohibitory laws that ever were thought on will not be sufficient to prevent manufactures in a country, whose inhabitants surpass the number that can subsist by the husbandry of it.
Franklin asserts that laws cannot prevent manufacturing in a populous country, indicating the inevitability of industrial growth.
Share
More from Benjamin Franklin
They have no profitable appointments, but a mere payment of daily wages, such as are scarcely equivalent to their expences, so that having no chance for great places and enormous salaries or pensions, as in some countries, there is no…
Few of their Children in the Country learn English . . . The Signs in our Streets have Inscriptions in both Languages, and in some places only [their language] . . . In short, unless the Stream of their Importation could be turned…
As it is in my power, as far as my testimony will be regarded, to refute this charge, I think it due to our friendship to do it.
Franklin's hand, in conjunction with his brethren of the learned committee, that compound of fraud and folly was unveiled, and received its death-wound.
Other voices in this conversation
