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"We are going to suffer, I am afraid, terribly in this war, whether we are in it or whether we stand aside. Foreign trade is going to stop, not because the trade routes are closed, but because there is no trade at the other end. Continental nations engaged in war all their populations, all their energies, all their wealth, engaged in a desperate struggle they cannot carry on the trade with us that they are carrying on in times of peace, whether we are parties to the war or whether we are not. I do not believe for a moment that at the end of this war, even if we stood aside and remained aside, we should be in a position, a material position, to use our force decisively to undo what had happened in the course of the war, to prevent the whole of the west of Europe opposite to us—if that had been the result of the war—falling under the domination of a single power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect." Edward Grey   "This was the same century in which the Mongols were exterminating every Russian, Muslim and Chinese person that they could get their hands on, sometimes slaughtering over 100,000 men, women and children at a go in some of history's worst blood orgies. Instead, we find in Columbus's journals a general sense of curiosity, of wonder even, and a genuine desire at many points to communicate and trade with natives, whose help Columbus realised he would need if his little expeditions were going to be successful. Let's remember that Columbus was first and foremost a merchant. His main purpose was to open a trade route to China. Europeans realised that China had better stuff. Like expert businessmen everywhere, Genoese merchants had long since realised that attacking the people you want to trade with is counterproductive." Jeff Fynn-Paul   "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   "I and my army are ready at all times to fight the queen's enemies and to do anything the English government may ask me, except to give up the slave trade. No other trade is known to my people. Palm oil, it is true, is engaging the attention of some of them, but it is a slow method of making money and brings only a very small amount of duties into my coffers. The planting of cotton and coffee has been suggested, but that is slower still; the trees have to grow and I may be in my grave before I reap any benefit from them, and what am I to do in the meantime? Who will pay my troops? Who will buy arms and clothes for them? And who will give me supplies of rum, gunpowder and cloth for my annual customs? I hold my power by the observance of the time-honored customs of my forefathers. I should forfeit it and entail on myself a life full of shame and a death full of misery by neglecting them. The slave trade has been the ruling principle with my people. It is the source of their glory and their wealth; their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery." Ghezo   "Jefferson's draft of the Declaration included a long condemnation of George III for his support of the slave trade. 'He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.' Here is a recognition, on Jefferson's part, that the slave trade violated the 'most sacred rights of life and liberty.' And, Jefferson continued, the king was 'determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold.' In his draft of the Declaration, Jefferson applied the term men to slaves at the same time he affirmed that all men are created equal, and he asserted that the natural rights that provided the basis for the Declaration also applied to slaves." James Fishkin   "Honest, loyal and decent people—ordinary working men and women—have been and are being dismissed because they are unwilling to join a trade union, even when they have been with their firm for twenty years, even when it was not a condition of employment to be a trade unionist when they started work. Other non-Unionists may be made redundant out of turn. There are elaborate laws against unfair dismissal. But in a recent Tribunal decision it was ruled that non-Unionists need not be considered equal with other workers. In this instance, the worker concerned was the first to lose his job although he had been with the firm longer than other men who stayed on. In the end, the real case against Socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality. There is nothing pure about the motives of people who want to boss your lives. Socialism is a system designed to enlarge the power of those people to the point where they control everyone and everything." Margaret Thatcher   "The argument of 'Necessity' was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery; and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction. Before the constitution, they prohibited its introduction into the north-western territory—the only country we owned, then free from it. At the framing and adoption of the constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word 'slave' or 'slavery' in the whole instrument. In the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a 'person held to service or labor.' In that prohibiting the abolition of the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as 'The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing, shall think proper to admit,' etc. These are the only provisions alluding to slavery. Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time." Abraham Lincoln   "In 1480 the Ming emperor of China ruled that overseas exploration and trade were forbidden; merchants who continued to trade were declared smugglers and troops were sent to destroy their settlements and burn their boats. No European king ever claimed or used such powers and no king could afford such a self-denying ordinance. In Europe kings operated in a network of rival states; the Chinese emperor had the advantage—or the trap—of possessing no rivals of equal power to his own." John Hirst   "Life for most animals is a trade-off between eating or being eaten, between looking for a mate and fleeing from danger, and they manage this trade-off between success and survival in all kinds of inventive ways. Among male field crickets, for instance, louder and longer singing attracts females, but it also attracts predators—so those with the longest trills are slower to break cover, offsetting the greater risk of long singing with greater shyness." Joe Moran   "The population of Africa in 1500 was only 46 million. The soil being mostly poor, there were few agricultural surpluses and so no incentive to develop property rights. For lack of the wheel and navigable rivers, transport within Africa was difficult and trade was small scale. For lack of demographic pressure, African societies had little incentive to develop the skills that trade stimulates, to accumulate capital, to develop occupational specialties or to generate modern societies. The phase of state and empire building had only just begun when it was cut short by European colonization." Nicholas Wade   "A young man going to Oxford learns the same things which were taught there two centuries ago; but, unlike the old scholars, he learns no lessons of poverty along with it. In his three years' course he will have tasted luxuries unknown to him at home, and contracted habits of self-indulgence which make subsequent hardships unbearable: while his antiquated knowledge, such as it is, has fallen out of the market; there is no demand for him; he is not sustained by the respect of the world, which finds him ignorant of everything in which it is interested. He is called educated; yet, if circumstances throw him on his own resources, he cannot earn a sixpence for himself. An Oxford education fits a man extremely well for the trade of gentleman. I do not know for what other trade it does fit him as at present constituted. More than one man who has taken high honours there, who has learnt faithfully all that the University undertakes to teach him, has been seen in these late years breaking stones upon a road in Australia. That was all which he was found to be fit for when brought in contact with the primary realities of things." James Froude   "Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among the different provinces of a great empire the freedom of the inland trade appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a dearth, but the most effectual preventative of a famine; so would the freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different states into which a great continent was divided." Adam Smith   "Politics is about assessing trade-offs; men are not angels, and angels do not govern men. In our fallen world, there is no policy that does not come with a corresponding cost. The great lie of the progressive desire for rule via 'the experts' is that no amount of scientific information or expertise can actually tell us how to navigate and weigh these varying considerations. That's what politics, properly understood, is for. But if Covid has taught us anything, it's that many of our leading experts—blinded as they are by their singular focus, unwilling to acknowledge even the existence of trade-offs—are unable to see the bigger picture." Nate Hochman   "Irreligion, discontent and covetousness have proliferated in broad sections of the population. The enormous expansion of communications, due to the world-wide telegraph and telephone networks, has entirely transformed the conditions of trade and commerce. Everything is done in a haste, at fever pitch. The night is used for travel, the day for business; even 'holiday trips' put a strain on the nervous system. Great political, industrial and financial crises carry this excitement into far wider areas of the population than ever before. Interest in political life has become universal: tempers are inflamed by political, religious and social struggles, party politics, electioneering and the immense growth of trade-unionism; people are forced to engage in constant mental activity and robbed of the time they need for relaxation, sleep and rest. Big-city life has become increasingly sophisticated and restless. The exhausted nerves seek recuperation in increased stimulation, in highly spiced pleasures, and the result is even greater exhaustion." Wilhelm Heinrich Erb   "We knew that anyone connected with business, of any kind, was morally inferior. 'Businessman' was a term of contempt. The portrait of the Wilcox family in E.M. Forster's Howards End as crude and philistine barbarians says it all. So does my picture of Richard in The Golden Notebook. I think this attitude was reinforced by the English aristocratic contempt for 'trade,' which had percolated down to levels far from its beginnings. Yet 'business,' trade, capitalism in short, was, in our canon, at times necessary and good. I do not remember that we made any attempt to reconcile, or even discuss, these 'contradictions.'" Doris Lessing   "The fact was that in Europe there were always some princes and local lords willing to tolerate merchants and their ways even when others plundered and expelled them; and as the record shows, oppressed Jewish traders, ruined Flemish textile workers, persecuted Huguenots, moved on and took their expertise with them. A Rhineland baron who overtaxed commercial travelers would find that the trade routes had gone elsewhere, and with it his revenues. A monarch who repudiated his debts would have immense difficulty raising a loan when the next war threatened and funds were quickly needed to equip his armies and fleets. Bankers and arms dealers were essential, not peripheral members of society. Gradually, unevenly, most of the regimes of Europe entered into a symbiotic relationship with the market economy, providing for it domestic order and a non arbitrary legal system (even for foreigners), and receiving in taxes a share of the growing profits in trade." Paul Kennedy   "Venice, whose influence was felt from the very first, has a well recognized and singular place in the economic history of Europe. Like Tyre, Venice shows an exclusively commercial character. Her first inhabitants, fleeing before the approach of the Huns, the Goths and the Lombards, had sought (in the fifth and sixth centuries) a refuge on the barren islets of the lagoons at Rialto, at Olivolo, at Spinalunga, at Dorsoduro. To exist in these marshes they had to tax their ingenuity and to fight against Nature herself. Everything was wanting: even drinking water was lacking. But the sea was enough for the existence of a folk who knew how to manage things. Fishing and the preparation of salt supplied an immediate means of livelihood to the Venetians. They were able to procure wheat by exchanging their products with the inhabitants of the neighboring shores. Trade was thus forced upon them by the very conditions under which they lived. And they had the energy and the genius to turn to profit the unlimited possibilities which trade offered them." Henri Pirenne   "When a man produces a commodity and exchanges it for money or some other commodity, he does so because the exchange confers an advantage. The advantage secured is the measure of the remuneration or the profit upon production. Hence we say that trade is conducted upon the lines of mutual advantage. As civilization advances the circle of exchange not only widens but becomes increasingly diversified and complex. The principle on which trade is conducted, however, remains the same; and a simple illustration will suffice to explain this. Three men, a tailor, a shoemaker, and a baker produce clothes, boots, and bread. Each requires, in addition to the commodities which he manufactures, the commodities manufactured by the other two. But each can with the greatest ease supply himself with the product of his own craft, he devotes his surplus time to supplying the other two, and in exchange gets the produce of their labour, so that all three finally get boots, bread, and clothes much more easily and much more cheaply than if each had resolved to do all these things himself." William Hamilton   "If they sought to purchase their council house, a local Labour council would forbid it. If they sought better schooling for their children, a local Labour council would direct them to their neighbourhood comprehensive—all too often, in Alastair Campbell's words, 'a bog-standard comprehensive.' If they sought to work longer hours or to improve their efficiency, their trade union would stand in the way. The Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1970s, in their desperate attempts to preserve a 'social contract' with the trade union leaders, were losing touch with those whom they were supposed to represent." Vernon Bogdanor   "The aristocratic ideal of virtus is, in its strict application, a concept at once extrovert and exclusive: extrovert in its emphasis on action, on facta; exclusive in its concern for the family and in that the service of the respublica alone was regarded as a fit field for the exercise of a noble's talents. Outside the service of the respublica there can be no magistratus and therefore, strictly speaking, no gloria, no nobilitas, no virtus. The traditional contempt of the Roman aristocrat for the business man is notorious from the writers of the first century B.C. All trade was stigmatised as undignified, especially for a man of rank, and retail trade held in particular contempt. Indeed, the word mercator appears as almost a term of abuse, while even a successful business man was considered inferior to a member of the senatorial aristocracy. This attitude, although it derives to a certain extent from the greatly increased self-consciousness of the nobility in the first century, was already developing by the end of the third. Plautus, at least, makes frequent reference to the commercial classes, who are invariably treated with hostility and contempt." Donald Earl