20.1. 1. Of Commerce.
The following subjects deserve to be treated in a
more extensive manner than the nature of this work will permit. Fain
would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.
Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is
almost a general rule that wherever we find agreeable manners, there
commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet
with agreeable manners.
Let us not be astonished, then, if our manners are now less savage
than formerly. Commerce has everywhere diffused a knowledge of the
manners of all nations: these are compared one with another, and from
this comparison arise the greatest advantages.
Commercial laws, it may be said, improve manners tor the same reason
that they destroy them. They corrupt the purest morals.
[1]
This was the
subject of Plato's complaints; and we every day see that they polish and
refine the most barbarous.
Footnotes
[1]
Cæsar said of the Gauls that they were spoiled by the
neighbourhood and commerce of Marseilles; insomuch that they who
formerly always conquered the Germans had now become inferior to them.
-- "De Bello Gall.," lib. vi. 23.
