issue of it. Ordinary self-inspection and foresight and industry being presupposed, the issue of exchanges is just what was expected by the two persons, the satisfaction of each follows as a matter of course, and stimulates to new exchanges in ever-widening circles.

Since the desires of all men, which the efforts of other men can satisfy through exchange, are indefinite in number and unlimited in degree, there is no end of human Satisfactions to be reached along this road of reciprocal trade; and since the very object of all trade and the actual result of all trade (the exceptions are infinitesimal) is to multiply and reduplicate continually mutual Satisfactions among men; we can see right here what a loss and wrong it is, what a wanton destruction of possible human happiness it is, what a bar to progress among men in comforts and powers it is, for nations to impede and to prohibit commerce by legislation! As we shall see more fully in a later chapter, Governments can have no moral or constitutional right to restrict the trade of their people, except in the sole interest of revenue or health or morals.

Such is the constitution of the universe, that a really good thing is usually cognate with and inseparable from a good many other good things. Buying and selling, as we have now clearly seen, springs right out of the nature of men in the circumstances in which they are providentially placed on the earth, and ends in the satisfaction of innumerable wants common to all men. This makes trade a thoroughly good thing in itself; and consequently it is intimately associated with many other good things. The scriptural instance, that we have been examining, gives a neat illustration of this: "and there was peace between Hiram and Solomon; and they two made a league together." The mutually profitable exchange of commodities led to a feeling of amity between the two neighboring kings; the feeling of amity led to a treaty of Peace between the two adjacent nations; and the "league" so ratified not only kept out war from their borders, but also permitted the unhindered continuance of profitable exchanges between them.

So it is always. Peace waits on Commerce. Good-will among the nations is strengthened by the ties of interest and profit among their citizens. The mercantile classes as such are always averse to war, because war is the natural enemy of exchanges. Thus traffic leads to peace and tends to maintain it, and peace preludes increased prosperity, and commercial prosperity under freedom is wholly friendly to mental and moral progress, and Christianity walks before and all along this line of individual and national blessing. The commercial treaty of 1860 between France and England has tended powerfully, perhaps more powerfully than any other single cause, to keep those formerly inter-belligerent nationalities in peace and amity ever since.

We will now put into a little table the final results of the present analysis of Buying and Selling. The ultimate elements seem to be these: