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commodity is kept by the average rate of profit on trade in general, no monopoly cam reduce the price of this commodity any more than of any other, for any length of time: you may keep your subjects from selling their sugars elsewhere, but you cannot force them to raise it for you at a loss. Lower than this natural price, no monopoly can ever keep it: down to this price, natural competition cannot fail to reduce it, sooner or later, without monopoly. Customers remaining as they were, without encrease of the number of traders there can be no reduction of price. Monopoly, that is, exclusion of customers, has certainly no tendency to produce encrease of the number of traders: it may pinch the profits of those whom it first falls upon, but that is not the way to invite others. Monopoly accordingly, as far as it does any thing, produces mischief without remedy. High prices on the other hand, the mischief against which monopoly is employed as a remedy, high prices, produced by competition among customers, cannot in any degree produce inconvenience, without laying a proportionate foundation for the cure. From high profits in trade comes influx of traders, from influx of traders competition among traders, from
C 3competition
