Wealth & Money Quote by Dudley North

North is doing something slyly rhetorical here: he stages the argument as if it’s a matter of plain-eyed empiricism ("cannot be denied") while smuggling in a hard political point about who gets to set the rules of the market. The sentence is built on asymmetry. Lower interest "may, and probably will" discourage some money from entering trade; high interest "certainly" draws it out. That calibration of certainty isn’t just verbal shading - it’s an attempt to shift policy intuition. If lawmakers are tempted to cap interest to protect borrowers (a common mercantilist impulse in his time), North pre-empts the moral framing and re-centers the conversation on incentives and flow.

Context matters: late 17th-century England is learning to finance war, empire, and urban growth with credit. "Money coming abroad into Trade" means capital moving from hoards, land rents, and safe keeping into risky commerce. North, often grouped with early free-trade thinkers, is pushing against the idea that the state can legislate prosperity by command - especially by fixing the price of money. His subtext is that credit is not a moral failing to be disciplined; it’s infrastructure. If you make returns unattractive, you don’t purify the economy, you starve it.

The line also flatters merchants and lenders as rational actors rather than profiteers. High interest "brings it out" suggests dormant wealth will only become productive when enticed. It’s an early argument for letting rates reflect scarcity and risk, and a warning that "cheap money" edicts can backfire by shrinking the very trade they’re meant to stimulate.