Robert Somers

“ But it must be allowed to argue a vast deal for the power of free trade that Great Britain, in the face of so many unreciprocal tariffs, has been able to open an effective market in her ports for amounts of foreign goods and produce which thirty years ago would have been deemed fabulous, while at the same time circulating her own commodities in such increasing quantities to all parts of the world. There can be little question that the free commercial policy of this country has been one of the leading springs of the late marvellous extension of international trade. ”

“ Exchange of commodities implies not only a division of labour, but a development of natural resources where most abundant and accessible. As long as mankind live in scattered and isolated families, each supplying its own wants directly by its own labour, there can be little or no commerce; and as long as there is no commerce every local habitation of man must depend on its natural resources, however poor, unvaried, or difficult to utilize. Division of labour and exchange may be said to be of twin birth, since the existence of the one cannot be conceived without the other ”

“ When the landlords and farmers were placed in full and direct competition with the world, no class of manufacturers had any excuse left for the slightest shred of protection. All these measures had the appearance more of liberal concessions to foreign nations than of any advantage to home producers, and this is, no doubt, the reason why free trade was so long resisted, and many were unable to see, until the problem was visibly demonstrated, that in liberating commerce, even in developing foreign resources, the most powerful impulse may be given to all the springs of domestic prosperity. ”

“ They placed the barbarous populations of Europe under a severe discipline, trained them in the most varied branches of industry, and developed an amount of handicraft and ingenuity which became an always more solid basis for the future. But trade was too walled in, too much clad in armour, and too incessantly disturbed by wars and tumults, and violations of common right and interest, to exert its full influence over the general society, or even to realize its most direct advantages. ”

“ If in the older times it was thought that a foreign merchant required to be not only a good man of business, but even a statesman, it is evident that all the higher faculties of the mercantile profession must still more be called into request when imports and exports are reckoned by hundreds instead of fives or tens of millions, when the markets are so much larger and more numerous, the competition so much more keen and varied, the problems to be solved in every course of transaction so much more complex, the whole range of affairs to be overseen so immensely widened. ”

“ The tendency of commerce to connect one seat of population with another, to open roads, to seize on every physical advantage of transit between them, to create new centres of industry and traffic on the lines of communication, and by the union, not only of human labour and capacities, but of almost boundlessly diversified territorial resources thus effected, to increase the production and circulation of commodities, is too obvious to require illustration. ”

“ It is more commonly, indeed, when commerce is somewhat still, and men, finding their means resting within limited bounds, learn to delight in labour and invention for their own sake apart from their immediate profits, that the quality of work is improved, and a vantage ground is established for more extended operations, than when commerce is in full career, everything buoyant, saleable, and rising in value, and the lust of gain has taken possession of the human spirit. ”

“ It is not a company of merchants, having a monopoly, and doing whatever they please, whether right or wrong, that now hold the commerce of the world in their hands, but large communities of free merchants in all parts of the world, affiliated to manufacturers and producers equally free, each under strong temptation to do what may be wrong in the pursuit of his own interest, and the only security of doing right being to follow steady lights of information and economic science common to all. ”

“ It is obvious that the destruction of Palmyra must not only have doomed Palestine, already bereft of her seaports, to greater poverty and commercial isolation than had been known in long preceding ages, but have also rendered it more difficult to Rome herself to hold or turn to any profitable account her conquests in Asia; and, being an example of the policy of Rome to the seats of trade over nearly the whole ancient world, it may be said to contain in graphic characters a presage of what came to be the actual event—the collapse and fall of the Roman empire itself. ”

“ The grandeur of Spain in the preceding century was due partly to the claim of her kings to be Holy Roman Emperors, in which imperial capacity they entailed intolerable mischief on the Low Countries and on the commercial civilization of Europe, and partly to their command of the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, in an eager lust of whose produce they brought cruel calamities on a newly-discovered continent where there were many traces of antique life, the records of which perished in their hands or under their feet. ”

“ Wherever there is population, industry, resource, art, and skill, there will be international trade. Commerce will have many centres, and one may relatively rise or relatively fall; but such decay and ruin as have smitten many once proud seats of wealth into dust cannot again occur without such cataclysms of war, violence, and disorder as the growing civilization and reason of mankind, and the power of law, right, and common interest forbid us to anticipate. ”

“ The lists of imports and exports and of the places from which they flowed to and from the centres of trade, as they swelled in bulk from time to time, show how busily and steadily the threads of commerce had been weaving together the labour and interests of mankind, and extending a security and bounty of existence unknown in former ages. ”

“ Commerce in all periods and countries has obtained a certain freedom and hospitality from the fact that the foreign merchant has something desirable to offer; but the action of trading is reciprocal, and requires multitudes of producers and merchants, as free agents, on both sides, searching out by patient experiment wants more advantageously supplied by exchange than by direct production, before it can attain either permanence or magnitude, or can become a vital element of national life. ”

“ But the same principle may be no less a guide to our understanding why the earliest records we have of great seats of population should be on the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Blue and Yellow Rivers of China; how Palmyra, the ancient grandeur of which has been discovered in its modern ruins, should have been built in the middle of a desert; how the cradle of navigation and maritime commerce should be so indelibly couched along the coasts and round the numerous islands of the Mediterranean Sea ”

“ The immediate effects in increasing the public revenue—even the customs revenue, which seemed endangered by the abolition of so many duties—in reviving British trade and manufactures, and imparting new life to agriculture itself, were so great that the free trade policy was speedily carried up to its highest points of triumph. ”

“ The substratum of the whole system of international traffic is that commodities, after bearing the cost of transit, are of more value in one place than in another. Commodities are often so abundant, or capable of being produced so abundantly in some places, as to be superfluities, and absolutely valueless in such places, and yet are of much value in other places. As this relation is mutual, there is nothing inconsistent in an exchange of commodities of more value in one place than in another with a gain of value on both sides of the exchange ”

“ Capital, in its monetary form of transfer, is as much a commodity as the more usual articles of trade; and when a country lends large sums to another country, the same effects are produced on the rates of exchange for the time being, and more protractedly on the general course of import and export, as would be produced by an equivalent amount of goods exported by the borrowing country. The imports of the borrower, during the period of expenditure of the loans, will increase; and the exports, though they may not diminish, will lose in some measure their previous proportion to the imports. ”

“ As long as navigation was confined to rivers and the shores of inland gulfs and seas, the oceans were a terra incognita, contributing nothing to the facility or security of transport from one part of the world to another, and leaving even one populous part of Asia as unapproachable from another as if they had been in different hemispheres. The various routes of trade from Europe and North-Western Asia to India, which have been often referred to, are to be regarded more as speculations of future development than as realities of ancient history. ”

“ Immensely important as the creative and stimulating effect of the free trade of Britain and the Californian and Australian gold discoveries had been, they pale before a mighty service that remains to be noticed, and which, in the prolific force of a world aroused to commerce, they had all the while been carrying forward in their train. ”

“ The republics of Italy, which had no claim to rival Venice or Genoa in maritime power or traffic, developed a degree of art, opulence, and refinement commanding the admiration of modern times; and if any historian of trans-Alpine Europe, when Venice had already attained some greatness, could have seen it 500 years afterwards, the many strong towns of France, Germany, and the Low Countries, the great number of their artizans, the products of their looms and anvils, and their various cunning workmanship might have added many a brilliant page to his annals. ”

“ The expected influence of so successful an illustration of free trade on other nations has not yet been realized to any considerable extent. A more liberal system of trade with France and other European countries has only been effected by treaty, which, however mutually advantageous in its results, is in its temporary and provisional character more or less unsatisfactory. It was not enough that Great Britain could say to her neighbours that free trade had worked well not only for herself but for them. ”

“ The first foreign merchants of whom we read, carrying goods and bags of silver from one distant region to another, were the Southern Arabs, reputed descendants of Ishmael and Esau. Touching in their territory on the south the Red Sea and the right bank of the Nile, and on the north and east the most densely inhabited tracts of Asia, and accustomed in their own interior economy to a free and nomadic life, it may have occurred to the more intelligent and enterprizing of these people to enter on this new and adventurous course. ”

“ There is not only a territorial extension of the division of labour in the sense of being spread over a larger area and a greatly more numerous population, but the physical resources, the natural agents of wealth themselves, as found in various countries and places, are brought into the general organization as they could be by no other means, and made to yield in due harmony with each other all their special and relative superiorities. ”

“ A consideration of this action of international traffic in commodities is sufficient to dispel many false views that have at various times been propounded with much authority such as that commerce, being an exchange of value for value, can add nothing to the general wealth; or that the profit of one party to an exchange is the loss of the other party; or that the only profit of commerce consists of the balance accruing in the precious metals ”

“ The words alone convey what an age we have been living in, and what the international progress in commerce must have been. In 1839 the ocean steamers in the world, if any, could have been counted on one's fingers. In the United Kingdom alone there are now 1597 steam vessels, of nearly 1000 average tonnage, wholly employed in foreign trade. All the greater maritime states have lines of ocean steamers, and there is scarce any part of the world to which goods and passengers are not carried with the speed, regularity, and capacity which steam-power has given to navigation. ”

“ One can hardly now realize the impression made by these discoveries in an age when the minds of men were awakening out of a long sleep, when the printing press was disseminating the ancient classical and sacred literature, and when geography and astronomy were subjects of eager study in the seats both of traffic and of learning. ”

“ The substantial advantage of the oceanic passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, as seen at the time, was to enable European trade with the East to escape from the Moors, Algerines, and Turks who now swarmed round the shores of the Mediterranean, and waged a predatory war on ships and cargoes which would have been a formidable obstacle even if traffic, after running this danger, had not to be further lost, or filtered into the smallest proportions, in the sands of the Isthmus, and among the Arabs who commanded the navigation of the Red and Arabian Seas. ”

“ Both the agricultural and the theocratic constitution of their society were unfavourable to a vigorous prosecution of foreign trade. In such traffic as they had with other nations they were served on their eastern borders by Arabian merchants, and on the west and south by the Phœnician shippers. The abundance of gold, silver, and other precious commodities gathered from distant parts, of which we read in the days of greatest Hebrew prosperity, has more the character of spoils of war and tributes of dependent states than the conquest by free exchange of their domestic produce and manufactures. ”

“ In old and populous countries, like India and China, modern manufacture had to meet and contend with ancient manufacture, and had at once to learn from and improve economically on the established models, before an opening could be made for its extension. In many parts of the New World there were vast tracts of country, without population or with native races too wild and savage to be reclaimed to habits of industry, whose resources could only be developed by the introduction of colonies of Europeans ”

“ The ancient polities offered much resistance to this development, and in their absolute power over the liberty, industry, and property of the masses of their subjects raised barriers to the extension of commerce scarcely less formidable than the want of means of communication itself. The conditions of security under which foreign trade can alone flourish equally exceeded the resources of ancient civilization. ”

“ The advantage which absolute power gave to ancient nations in their warlike enterprises, and in the execution of public works of more or less utility, or of mere ostentation and monumental magnificence, was dearly purchased by the sacrifice of individual freedom, the right to labour, produce, and exchange under the steady operation of natural economic principles, which more than any other cause vitalizes the individual and social energies, and multiplies the commercial resource of communities. ”

“ Every great breach of this security stops the continuous circulation, which is the life of traffic and of the industries to which it ministers. But in the ancient records we see commerce exposed to great risks, subject to constant pillage, hunted down in peace, and utterly extinguished in war. Hence it became necessary that foreign trade should itself be an armed force in the world ”