Michael Perelman asks, > To what extent was the Wealth of Nation written as a blueprint for > Scotland rather than England? Whew! Now there's a broad and ill-defined question, which, no doubt, can be approached from a number of perspectives. I will simply observe that Smith did not seem to draw much of a distinction between the two regions beyond praising their 1707 Union. Recall his comment to Strahan (Letter 50, dated 4 Apr, 1760), that "the Union was a measure from which infinite Good has been derived to this country," though he acknowledged that, at the time, "the Prospect of that good, however, must then have appeared very remote and very uncertain." Nevertheless, although, "at the time, all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure so hurtful to their immediate interest, [t]he views of their Posterity are now very different." The nature of that "Good" was both commercial and political. As to the former, the Union spurred agricultural improvement by its stimulus to meat prices. Because "the union opened the market of England to the highland cattle," Scottish cattle prices were, by Smith's reckoning, "at the present about three times greater than at the beginning of the century" and, what was more important, meat prices "in almost every part of Great Britain" were double that of bread by weight (WN, I.xi.b.8). Because "the quantity of well-cultivated land must be in proportion to the quantity of manure which the farm itself produces," and because cattle cannot be fed on cultivated land unless their price is "sufficient to pay for the produce of improved and cultivated land," agricultural improvement requires a concurrent rise in the price of meat relative to that of wheat: "The increase of stock and the improvement of land are two events which must go hand in hand." Consequently, "Of all the commercial advantages ... which Scotland has derived from the union with England, this rise in the price of cattle is, perhaps, the greatest." (I.xi.l.3). It is true that by the Union, Scottish wool "was excluded from the great market of Europe and confined to the narrow one of Great Britain," thereby producing a sharp fall in its price; but "the rise in the price of butcher's-meat fully compensated the fall in the price of wool" (I.xi.m.13) As to the political benefit, "by the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a compleat deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them," a benefit which would accrue to the people of Ireland as well (V.iii.89). Hence, I do not see in The Wealth of Nations an effort to distinguish in any significant way between Scotland and Britain; they are treated as a unified nation, which, of course, was the case. Glenn Hueckel