Peace is the natural effect of trade.
Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent;
for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in
selling: and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.
But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the
same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries
[2]
where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all
the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which
humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only for money.
The spirit of trade produces in the mind of a man a certain sense of
exact justice, opposite, on the one hand, to robbery, and on the other
to those moral virtues which forbid our always adhering rigidly to the
rules of private interest, and suffer us to neglect this for the
advantage of others.
The total privation of trade, on the contrary, produces robbery,
which Aristotle ranks in the number of means of acquiring; yet it is not
at all inconsistent with certain moral virtues. Hospitality, for
instance, is most rare in trading countries, while it is found in the
most admirable perfection among nations of vagabonds.
It is a sacrilege, says Tacitus, for a German to shut his door
against any man whomsoever, whether known or unknown. He who has behaved
with hospitality to a stranger goes to show him another house where this
hospitality is also practised; and he is there received with the same
humanity.
[3]
But when the Germans had founded kingdoms, hospitality had
become burdensome. This appears by two laws of the code of the
Burgundians;
[4]
one of which inflicted a penalty on every barbarian who
presumed to show a stranger the house of a Roman; and the other decreed
that whoever received a stranger should be indemnified by the
inhabitants, every one being obliged to pay his proper proportion.
