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"Adam Smith's most serious offense, for his Edinburgh contemporary the Reverend Alexander Carlyle, consisted in 'introducing that unrestrained and universal commerce, which propagates opinions as well as commodities.' The commerce in opinions was itself, in large part, a commerce in opinions about commerce, or about commercial policy. The 'focal point of enlightenment,' Kant says in What is Enlightenment?—the subject to be disputed, in the imperative to 'argue as much as you like and about whatever you like'—consists in matters of religion. But economic matters are also a subject of enlightened discussion in Kant's description; the tax official says, '"Don't argue, pay!"' and the cosmopolitan citizen 'publicly voices his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice of such fiscal measures.'" Emma Rothschild   "Trade was regarded as a base occupation, unworthy of gentlemen though not really unbecoming for commoners who would be unable to find a more dignified means of support. This prejudiced view was sanctioned by laws which, purportedly in order to make it easier for poorer people to earn their living, forbade noblemen to engage in commerce. It is true that long distance commerce, when carried out on a large scale, was 'not so very discreditable' (to use Cicero's judgment); still a man of that profession could fully redeem himself only if he retired from business as soon as he had gathered enough money to buy land and live like a gentleman. There were, of course, grasping men whom no legal or social disapproval could stop; we do hear of senators exercising petty trade through men of straw, and of plebeians trying to pass off as respectable men while clinging to their well-established export-import business. Nevertheless, the bad odor of commerce encouraged the natural propensity of affluent landowners to dissipate their capital in conspicuous consumption, and enticed status-seeking merchants to sink in uneventful agriculture the accumulated assets of thriving commercial enterprises. It also led the government to disregard trade in its planning." Robert Lopez   "There is no department in commerce in which those who exercise it do not seek to escape from competition, and who do not find sophisms to make the state believe that it is interested, at least, to exclude the rivalry of foreigners, whom they easily represent to be the enemies of national commerce. If we listen to them, and we have listened to them too often, all branches of commerce would be infected by this spirit of monopoly." Anne Robert Jacques Turgot   "The acknowledged novelty of the new American nation's political experiments has too often obscured the equally strong sense contemporaries had that they were entering a new economic era as well. Gouverneur Morris, for instance, called his fellow countrymen of 1782 'the first born children of extended Commerce in modern Times.' Americans were repeatedly characterized as eager market participants—certainly when it came to spending and borrowing—and commerce itself was associated with a remarkable augmentation of wealth-producing possibilities. 'The spirit for Trade which pervades these States is not to be restrained,' George Washington wrote to James Warren in 1784. Jefferson, eager to build canals linking the Chesapeake to the interior valleys of Virginia, wrote Washington that since all the world was becoming commercial, America too must get as much as possible of this modern source of wealth and power." Joyce Appleby   "Other nations have made the interests of commerce yield to those of politics; the English, on the contrary, have ever made their political interests give way to those of commerce." Charles-Louis de Secondat   "Before the Reformation, as there was but one religion, there was but one kind of sacred music in Europe, plain chant, and the descant built upon it. That music likewise was applied to one language only, the Latin. On that account, the compositions of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Flanders, and England, kept pace in a great degree with each other in style and excellence. All the arts seem to have been the companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce: they appeared first in Italy, then in the Hanseatic towns, next in the Netherlands; and during the 16th century, when commerce became general in every part of Europe." Charles Burney   "The pilgrimage to Mecca is the Islamic equivalent of pilgrimages undertaken by Jews and Christians. But neither Judaism nor Christianity considered the pilgrimage an economic event, certainly never the backdrop for a trade fair. By contrast, the Quran treats the economic side of the Islamic pilgrimage as inseparable from its religious side. Immediately after a passage describing the pilgrimage duty, it reiterates the legitimacy of commerce: 'It is no sin for you to seek the bounty of your Lord by trading.' In practice, too, the pilgrimage was intertwined with commerce. At the start of his journey a pilgrim would be blessed through the formula: 'May Allah accept your pilgrimage, condone your sins, and let you find a good market for your wares.'" Timur Kuran   "Commerce has a special character which distinguishes it from all other professions. It affects the feelings of men so strongly that it makes him who was proud and haughty suddenly turn supple, bending and serviceable. Through commerce, man learns to deliberate, to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both talk and action. Sensing the necessity to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least his demeanor exhibits decency and seriousness so as not to arouse any adverse judgement on the part of present and future acquaintances; he would not dare make a spectacle of himself for fear of damaging his credit standing, and thus society may well avoid a scandal which it might otherwise have to deplore." Samuel Ricard   "The fetters in which pre-existing laws bound our commerce have been removed, and the result is that we possess the greatest, the most stable, and the most lucrative commerce which the world has ever seen. Deep as was Adam Smith's conviction of the truth of his principles, the history of England for the last thirty years would have been almost inconceivable to him. Thirty years ago Carlyle and Arnold had nearly convinced the world of the irrecoverable poverty of our lower classes. The 'condition of England question,' as they termed it, was bringing us fast to ruin. But, in fact, we were on the eve of the greatest prosperity which we have ever seen, or perhaps any other nation. And it was to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and to the series of changes of which this was the type, and the most important, that we owe this wonderful contrast. The nature and the direction of the result Adam Smith would have unquestionably accepted; but the magnitude and the rapidity—the 'figures and the pace'—would have been far beyond his imagination. Even to us, with the aid of our modern experience of large transactions, they are amazing, and no mind trained in the comparatively slow and small school of the eighteenth century would, a hundred years since, have been able to think them possible." Walter Bagehot   "A man who was always the stronger would never conceive the idea of commerce. It is experience, by proving to him that war, that is the use of his strength against the strength of others, exposes him to a variety of obstacles and defeats, that leads him to resort to commerce, that is to a milder and surer means of engaging the interest of others to agree to what suits his own." Benjamin Constant   "The abbots of Cluny were as proficient in collecting real and movable estates as in attracting devoted souls. With commerce, however, they were ill at ease; a man of high dignity might perhaps do some buying and selling through a trusted middleman, but would hesitate to expose his name on the market place. In the theoretical structure of feudal society there scarcely was room for a middle class between the exalted religious and lay lords and the lowly but irreplaceable laborers. Paupers were more acceptable than merchants: they would inherit the Kingdom of Heaven and help the almsgiving rich to earn entrance. Merchants were gold-hungry, said Rathier, the Belgian bishop of Verona; they were less useful than farmers who fed the entire population, said Aelfric, the English abbot of Eynsham; they did not know what honor means, said Ramon Muntaner, the Catalan soldier-adventurer. 'Largess,' that is, squandering wealth on gifts and conspicuous consumption, was one of the most honored virtues in Scandinavian sagas and Romance chivalry poems. Every code has its exceptions, but the bias existed in the tenth century as in the age of Augustus, in Germany as in China; it has not been entirely dispelled today. It took exceptional men in exceptional circumstances to break the spell and make commerce the most rapidly expanding, if not the largest frontier of the medieval West." Robert Lopez   "War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war." Benjamin Constant   "Far from being hedonistic free-thinkers, the Polynesians regulated their lives by rigid social laws and possessed deeply held religious beliefs. Taboo, after all, is a Polynesian word. Their famous promiscuity was, in Cook's view, not the spontaneous expression of a free and natural people—Cook had no time for such fantasies—but the sordid and demeaning consequence of 'a commerce with Europeans.' (Some modern anthropologists have agreed with him.) It was we, 'civilized Christians,' he wrote in disgust, who were ultimately responsible for introducing among them 'wants and perhaps diseases, which they never before knew, and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their Fore fathers had injoy'ed.' If anyone, he complained bitterly—if inconsistently—'denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.'" Anthony Pagden   "No cause indeed has perhaps more promoted, in every respect, the general prosperity of the United States, than the absence of those systems of internal restrictions and monopoly which continue to disfigure the state of society in other countries. No laws exist here directly or indirectly confining man to a particular occupation or place, or excluding any citizen from any branch he may at any time think proper to pursue. Industry is in every respect perfectly free and unfettered; every species of trade, commerce, art, profession, and manufacture, being equally opened to all, without requiring any previous regular apprenticeship, admission, or license. Hence the progress of America has not been confined to the improvement of her agriculture, and to the rapid formation of new settlements and states in the wilderness, but her citizens have extended their commerce through every part of the globe, and carry on with complete success even those branches for which a monopoly had heretofore been considered essentially necessary." Albert Gallatin   "Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the empire's drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs' basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, spades, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron, there were no wheeled plowshares with moldboards. The lack of plows was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could pulverize light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved, and turned by hand. Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until about A.D. 900. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals." William Manchester   "On the one hand, Nazi leaders associated mass consumption and commerce with insidious elements—liberalism, materialism, Americanism, and Jewish financial interests. Wrote a Nazi periodical, 'The Americans, whose main representatives are the Jews, think commercially in everything, whether in art, scholarship, or social and family life.' On the other hand, the Nazis committed themselves to pulling their country out of the Depression and to creating a racially pure Germany that enjoyed a high standard of living; they thus depended on the very tools of mass consumption that they decried." Jonathan Wiesen   "How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!" Adam Smith   "In general I would only observe that commerce, consisting in a mutual exchange of the necessaries and conveniences of life, the more free and unrestrained it is the more it flourishes, and the happier are all the nations concerned in it. Most of the restraints put upon it in different countries seem to have been the projects of particulars for their private interest under pretense of public good." Benjamin Franklin   "War was the savage impulse; commerce is the civilized calculation. It is clear that the more the commercial tendency dominates, the more the warrior tendency becomes weak. The unique aim of modern nations is tranquility, with tranquility comfort, and, as the source of comfort, industry. War each day becomes a less efficacious means to attain this aim. It does not offer to individuals and to nations benefits which equal the results of peaceful work and regular exchange." Benjamin Constant   "It is most certain that our countrymen are not and never were Spartans in their contempt of weath, and I will go farther and say they ought not to be. Such a trait in their character would render them lazy drones, unfit for the agriculture, manufacture, fisheries, and commerce, and population of their country, and fit only for war." John Adams