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284 Germano Maifreda

international trade. Explicitly formulated by David Hume and already
present in the work of important thinkers – including Cantillon – it de-
clared that, should the operations of purchase and sale of goods and
services coming from a specific country add up to different totals, that
difference must be compensated in coin, and that this flow of metal
inevitably acted upon the level of prices and income. These, in turn,
contributed to a modification in the number of orders and thus in the
flow of goods, determining automatically (according to this model) the
balancing of the active and passive voices and a distribution of gold
sufficient to sustain the prices resulting from the process.
Though Verri started from Hume’s classic position, he gave it a
wholly original development, highlighting just that creativity on which
his «economy of supply» depends. In an addition to the ‘sixth edition’,
in fact, Verri goes on to declare the inexactness of Hume’s «mechanism»
when «universal goods [are] acquired through toil». In this case, the
quantity of «specific goods will multiply in proportion to the overall ex-
pansion [in quantity] of all goods and the number of contracts will
grow in proportion to the means for making them, as we shall presently
see; so it follows that universal goods acquired through labor and
scattered across a large number of individuals will more rapidly remedy
and compensate the bad effects which mass alone is supposed to pro-
duce». Where «untiring industry and a florid commerce make the
quantity of universal goods grow steadily, they will bring about a new
stimulus to industry itself, increase the number of contracts, make in-
ternal circulation ever more rapid, make known new commodities for
life and new easements, refine the arts and manufactures, invent new
models to make them more perfect and construct them more rapidly;
everything will breathe culture, fortune and life» (ibid.).
Having learned from Hume that the implications of the monetary
aspect and of prices in active and passive commerce were not in and
of themselves inevitable, so that it was possible to hypothesize a sort
of self-regulatory mechanism of exchange between them, Verri ended
up reorienting the whole theory by assuming the altering of the
relative positions of national and foreign goods. Already when he had
compiled his Estratti da Hume – and had then reaffirmed forcefully in
his presentation of the balance of trade for 1762 – he had shown
himself conscious of the fact that this sort of automatic re-balancing
25
might not come into play in daily economic life .

25 A. Moioli, Nota introduttiva to P. Verri, Bilancia del commercio dello stato di Milano,
in Bognetti, G., A. Moioli, P.L. Porta, G. Tonelli (eds), Scritti di economia, finanza e ammi-
nistrazione, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e let-
teratura, 2003, pp. 459-86, p. 459.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018 n.43
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)