An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

by Adam Smith

patrimony

concerns. The affected anxiety of the lawgiver, lest they should employ an improper person, is evidently as impertinent as it is oppressive.

fraud.

engross

They would probably be so everywhere, if corporation laws and the corporation spirit did not prevent it.

The high duties upon foreign manufactures, and upon all goods imported by alien merchants, all tend to the same purpose.

Corporation laws enable the inhabitants of

towns to raise their prices, without fearing to be undersold by the free competition...

The enhancement of price occasioned by both is everywhere finally paid by the landlords, farmers, and labourers, of the country, who have seldom oppo...

sophistry

That industry has its limits like every other; and the increase of stock, by increasing the competition, necessarily reduces the profit.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

register,

An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.

In a free trade, an effectual combination cannot be established but by the unanimous consent of every single trader, and it cannot last longer than every single trader continues of the same mind.

The pretence that corporations are necessary for the better government of the trade, is without any foundation.

effectual

bursaries,

indigence

benefices

ecclesiastical

meanness

indigent

Isocrates,

sophists,

Isocrates

rhetoric.

Plutarch,

didactron,

em...

munificently

Carneades

Diogenes

s...

statute

dither

parish,

connived

accounted

nativity,

caprice

tenement

freehold

parish

discretionary

mandamus

sufferance

To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour, from the parish where he chooses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice.

grievance;

clamour,