Mercantilism

“ Yet even while he internalized the authoritative negation of his activity, the merchant continued to practice his increasingly profitable calling in a situation where the powers of authorities, of monarch, nobility and Church, increasingly depended on the fruit of the merchant's sin, on money. When the merchant's activity of buying and selling was combined with the artisan's commodity production, money became Capital and the merchant became a personification of means of production, a capitalist—centuries before the development of economics, middle class morality, or the modern State. ”

“ But, the credit of the British merchant is the support of the commerce of the world; his books are not, lightly, nor for any ordinary purpose, to be taken out of his own hands. The secrets of his business are not to be too curiously pryed into. The books of a single merchant may betray the secrets, not only of his own affairs, but of those with whom he is principally connected in business; and the reciprocal confidence of the whole commercial world may, by the authoritative enquiry of these commissioners, be shaken. ”

“ Let the dealer keep pure goods, and teach his clerk their merit. By so doing, he can be twice armed when he is selling in competition with a dealer of adulterations.
Let not the merchant profess to seek after the prosperity of the country; let him wonder not that business is dull; that labor is unemployed; that enterprise is dead, when he is doing all he can to destroy business and commercial prosperity by undermining the public confidence, which is the foundation upon which all commercial enterprise rests. ”

“ The merchant always advanced the goods or money with which to trade, and the fact that he could, if he wished to do so, fix his own profit at double the value of the capital, is an indication of the very satisfactory returns obtained at this period from foreign commerce. ”

“ This might furnish an exchange for eight millions of the productions of this country; but it is under a monopoly, and that not of a mercantile, but of a financiering company, whose interest is, to pay in money and not in merchandise, and who are so much governed by the spirit of simplifying their purchases and proceedings, that they find means to elude every endeavor on the part of government, to make them diffuse their purchases among the merchants in general. Little profit is derived from this, then, as an article of exchange for the produce and manufactures of France. ”

“ A great many seem to think that trading or merchandizing is more genteel, and that it is more gentlemanly not to learn some profitable trade or business. A considerable number who have been engaged in mercantile pursuits, owing to this change in our system of business, will no doubt be thrown out of employment; they will have to seek other avocations. Some persons who possess capital will have to seek other avenues in which to invest that capital. In a new country like this there is a variety of ways open to them for its safe and profitable investment. ”

“ The mercantile system.It not only corrupted speculative science, but it infected the whole commercial policy of every European nation. These errors are associated with the policy which has received the name of the mercantile system. The essence of the mercantile system was to identify wealth with money. Now the use of money is one of the first signs which marks a nation's progress from barbarism towards civilisation. Societies even comparatively rude must be impressed with the necessity of adopting some medium of exchange. ”

“ English merchants will soon enough feel the pressure of slack business and force ministers to another line of conduct. A good plan enough for the man of independent fortune, for the judge whose income was assured, or the thrifty merchant who, signing a non-importation agreement, had laid in a stock of goods to be sold at high prices. But the wage-earner, the small shopkeeper who was soon sold out, the printer who lived on his weekly margin of profit, the rising lawyer whose income rose or fell with his fees: such men were of another mind. ”

“ I buy, dispense, and disperse human labor. I create wants, and I satisfy them. I will establish honest laws of trade. What I do shall be rated as commercial law. What I say shall be quoted as a way of equity and probity. That man is a King of Trade. His throne is set upon hills and seas. His subjects are all men with needs, and all men with products of the land, the coasts, the sea, or brain, or skill. This is the lawful King of Trade. He represents God's mart of exchange. Primarily, goods are not bought and sold in the market. They are first transferred in that man's brain. ”

“ Many of the old shops are nearly empty, and the little trade which yet exists is carried on by a sort of adventurers who, without being bred to any one trade, set up half a dozen, and perhaps disappear three months afterwards. They are, I believe, chiefly men who have speculated on the assignats, and as soon as they have turned their capital in a mercantile way a short time, become apprehensive of the paper, realize it, and retire; or, becoming bankrupts by some unlucky monopoly, begin a new career of patriotism. ”

“ When companies are not established, and when trade is open, our merchants, by their eagerness to profit of the new trade, betray the secrets of it, they enter into competition for the purchase of the foreign produce, and this raises prices and favours the commerce of the most ignorant savages. ”

“ While posing as a commercial apologist, I do not pretend that Commerce is carried on on altruistic or philanthropic principles. It may be regarded as a reflection on some 2,000 years of Christianity, but the fact remains that to those engaged in trade life is a battlefield, and the prizes go to the fiercest fighters. It is strange to consider the gradations of trade from retail to wholesale, wholesale to limited liability, and thence to the zenith, to that weird triumph of destructive and constructive intelligence and organizing power, the combine or trust. ”

“ The manufacturer supplies the wholesale dealer; the wholesale dealer provides the retail tradesman; and the retail tradesman carries on his business with his customers upon the sure foundation of credit. Not a coin is seen in the hands of either party from one year’s end to the other; and a man’s wealth is known not by the mere exchangeable property he possesses, but by the extent of the credit he is allowed. Political economy is a wonderful science, sir; and the ancients were entirely ignorant of its true principles. ”

“ The mercantile part of the world, therefore, wisely use of the term EMPLOYING HANDS, and justly prefer each other as they employ more or fewer; for thus one merchant says he is greater than another because he employs more hands. And now indeed the merchant should seem to challenge some character of greatness, did we not necessarily come to a second division, viz., of those who employ hands for the use of the community in which they live, and of those who employ hands merely for their own use, without any regard to the benefit of society. ”

“ All these items are present in varying degree, whatever the size of the business, except where a merchant has capital enough of his own to carry on a small business and can attend to the wants of his customers alone or with the help of his family. The temptation of the merchant is strong to use every possible means to make a success of his business, paying wages as low as possible, in order to cut down expenses, and offering all kinds of inducements to customers in order to sell his goods. ”

“ Because in all mercantile negotiations it is ruinous to invest capital in supplies which fail of demand. You undertake to publish books that booksellers will not publish: why? Because booksellers can’t sell them. It’s just probable that you’ll not sell them any better than the booksellers. Ergo, the more your business, the larger your deficit; and the more numerous your society, the more disastrous your condition. ”

“ People, you know, who are on the lookout for custom strive to present as smart an appearance as possible. Most of the goods merchants keep they expect to sell, but there are articles in every stock for which there is little or no demand or profit in the handling. These the merchant keeps to gratify his pride of proprietorship. Perhaps I have such a weakness, but with which face do you think I seek preferment, my son? ”

“ The mercantile system, aiming to increase the stock of ready money in the country.—Whether rulers were justified or not in the anxiety that they showed about the money supply, they made it a cardinal point in their policy to regulate commerce so as to increase, if possible, the stock of the precious metals in the country. They argued that the country would make money if it sold more merchandise to foreigners than it bought of them, for then the foreigners would have to make up the balance in coin or bullion. ”

“ Have we not been long ago taught, that in the mercantile world capital goes where it is most wanted—that the business which is at any time attracting capital by unusually high returns, is a business proved by that very fact to be unusually active—that its unusual activity shows society to be making great demands upon it; giving it high profits; wanting its commodities or services more than other commodities or services? ”

“ As, on the other hand, a merchant may export the manufactures of his own country to his own loss and the nation’s gain. But if the merchants be gainers, the consumers, that is those for whose use manufactures are established, having a power of purchasing or not at pleasure, must be so too. ”

“ The interest of the mercantile class may happen to differ from that of the whole community. For example; it is, generally speaking, the interest of the merchant to import and export every thing; the interest of manufacturers to lessen imports in order to raise the price of domestic fabrics, and to check exports, where they may enhance the price of raw materials. ”

“ This caused a new factor to enter the organisation—the merchant manufacturer, whose function it was to attend to the marketing of goods produced in each one particular industry. The wider the distance in point of time and place between producers and consumers, the more important did the functions of the merchant manufacturer become, until he, in fact, controlled the industry by virtue of his possession of capital. Without capital the gap between producer and consumer could not be bridged. ”

“ It is in truth a surviving relic of the Mercantile Theory, according to which, money being the only wealth, selling, or in other words, exchanging goods for money, was (to countries without mines of their own) the only way of growing rich—and importation of goods, that is to say, parting with money, was so much subtracted from the benefit. ”

“ Next to them are the manufacturers, after which but at a great distance, comes the mercantile interest, for in fact they belong to no country, their wealth is movable, and they seek to gain by all, which they are in the habit of doing at the expense of every principle ”

“ Having thus found means to draw hands from the manufacture, and confiding in the strength of a capital drawn from the public revenues, they pursue their ideas from the purchase of their manufacture to the purchase of the material in its crudest state. "We recommend you to give an increased price, if necessary, so as to take that trade out of the hands of other merchants and rival nations." A double bounty was thus given against the manufactures, both in the labor and in the materials. ”

“ West found the society wholly devoted to mercantile pursuits. A disposition to estimate the value of things, not by their utility, or by their beauty, but by the price which they would bring in the market, almost universally prevailed. Mercantile men are habituated by the nature of their transactions to overlook the intrinsic qualities of the very commodities in which they deal; and though of all the community they are the most liberal and the most munificent, they set the least value on intellectual productions. ”

“ A general application of the Act to all combinations of business and capital organized to suppress commercial competition is in harmony with the spirit and impulses of the times which gave it birth. 'Trusts' and 'monopolies' were the terror of the period. ”

“ The mercantile school assumed the same to be true of the nation at large, overlooking the fact that in the nation at large what is profit to one man may be cost to some one else, as in the case of the merchants who exported goods at a profit because they paid the laborers so little for their work. Again, a private business may be said to be prosperous when its products are greater than its costs. ”

“ Tell the monopolist that the true method of acquiring general riches, political power, and even his own private advantage, is to sell his country's produce as high, and foreign goods as low, as possible, and that public competition can alone accomplish this. Let foreign merchants, who bring capital, and those who practise any art or handicraft, be permitted to settle freely. ”

“ It can acquire a monopoly against individual merchants in any branch of mercantile business in which it may engage; and, after having prostrated all competition, it can then regulate the price of any article of commerce according to its pleasure. ”

“ From being a body concerned in trade on their own account, and employing their servants as factors, the servants have at one stroke taken the whole trade into their own hands, on their own capital of 800,000l., at their own risk, and the Company are become agents and factors to them, to sell by commission their goods for their profit. ”

“ The producer furnishes the goods, the consumer the money. Trade furnishes credit, [54] founded on little or no actual capital, and the different members of the commercial body are in no way responsible for one another. ”