While universal occupation, agricultural, mercantile and professional, imbues society with its spirit of punctuality and exactitude, poverty does not vitiate the lower, nor profligacy distinguish the higher classes. The laws of honour, as we have seen, have been adopted in their fullest rigour; and infractions of good faith or propriety are liable to the loss of character, of fortune, and of life itself: nor is there any community, among whom the temptations to debasement are less powerful, or where the laws and morals combine to oppose a more effectual restraint on those crimes that cause it.

5. A view of the resources and prospects of the United States necessarily involves some consideration of that commercial capacity, by which they are connected, as regards their intercourse with the rest of the world, and as it affects them with the policy and revolutions of other great commercial empires. I have endeavoured to show that trade does not impoverish, deteriorate or demoralize. But this must be understood with reference to spontaneous trade, the offspring of superfluous agriculture, or superior arts. The commerce which furnishes a national revenue, which cultivates an inexhaustible territory, and may at any moment be modified or suspended with no heavier grievance than a temporary deprivation of profit, should not be confounded with that exotic traffic, for whose products a nation neglects its agriculture, which is protected by navies that cost eternal wars, and impoverishes the people that it may magnify the state. It is natural for an exuberant country to throw off its annual superfluities, whose revenue is

the harvest of the river, and who is a mart of nations; but it is as unnatural as fatal to stretch every sinew till it cracks, in commercial efforts.

With the benignant influence of free trade, nothing is more militant than the baneful spirit of monopoly.' The latter, like all other systems founded on injustice, is of temporary advantage and ultimate ruin to its supporters. A warlike nation may extend their dominion by arms, in defiance of the opposition of others. But commercial aggrandizement to the prejudice of the rest of the world, attempted by any one people, is a position that cannot possibly be long maintained. Exclusive restrictions, with whatsoever art and power fortified, may for a time attract an excessive proportion of traffic and grandeur to any particular state; but they inevitably draw upon it, at the same time, the jealousy and hostility of all others. It is the fate of national monopolies that by the time they have completely succeeded, the whole world is in league to beat them down; and the state which wages war for their perpetuation, must either surrender them when they are most productive, or sink at last, exhausted by its own exertions, overcome by its multiplied enemies. Independent of the reasoning that suggests itself in support of this opinion from the common operation of cause to effect, an historical examination of monopolies, as they have been successively attempted by different empires, will show that there is scarcely one, which, after a short and specious show of greatness, has not recoiled destructively on its contrivers. Venice, Portugal, Holland, Spain and England are fatal testimonies of the disaster and

destruction, in which these flattering expedients must terminate. England indeed is still a great power: but however successfully she may resist subjugation, it is impossible she can hold for ever the pretensions she sets up against all the world. The cruel impolicy of the Spanish commercial system was long exemplified in the impoverishment and decline of the peninsula, and the ignorance and retardment of South America. And Spain is now undergoing the results of her parsimonious sequestration of those immense resources, which, under proper government, would have enriched and made happy all her extended realms. Smuggling, contraband, blockades, searches, are the immediate offspring of monopoly. Commercial frauds increase in proportion to the belligerent prohibitions opposed to them. Simulation on the one hand becomes as indispensable as rapine on the other, till at last the maritime intercourse of states will become so distorted, as to exhibit one universal scene of tolerated piracy.

A war for commerce destroys the very object it is waged to maintain. Europe has been drenched in desolation for commercial advantages, which have taken refuge in the pacific policy of the United States. While the incalculable resources of so large a portion of Asia, Africa, and South America, remain unemployed, the dreadful havoc that has been committed during the last 20 years for the produce of a West-India island, or a little carrying or colonial trade, is an awful rebuke to the boasted scientific and geographical improvements of modern times. Three fourths of the globe, and all their superfluities.

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are scarcely known to the remaining fourth, which, with the lights of pre-eminent civilization, is wasting itself in wars for the comparatively inconsiderable remainder. The richest regions of the most extensive quarters of the globe are suffered to lie unexplored, while every endeavour is making to limit and prevent the extension of that commerce, which would bring the whole into active beneficence. Millions of lives have been uselessly and wickedly sacrificed, millions of happy and industrious beings thrown out of employment into idleness and want, millions of irredeemable debts contracted, all the pernicious consequences of using men to unjust laws and rapacious avocations incurred, and military despotisms made more common and tremendous than they were in the dark ages, by the infatuation which would establish national greatness on the perverted and tottering basis of navigation projects of exclusive aggrandize

ment.

Fortunately for America, and for the world in general, this state of things is not ascribable to the spirit of trade, but to the delusion of monopolists; and many indications appear of its approaching dissolution. It is probable that before the lapse of half a century mankind will look back with wonder and contempt to the narrow confines of that traffic, they are now destroying each other to restrain. We do not recur with more scorn to the awe with which the ancients regarded the Straits of Gibraltar, as the ultimate verge of the earth, than a succeeding, and probably the next, generation will to our strife for objects of such inferior moment, while others of in

finitely greater magnitude were within our attainment. The ancients were withheld by an ignorance of those scientific discoveries, that have enabled the present race to traverse the remotest latitudes. But the latter are blinded by the common fatuity of avarice, which destroys lest others might possess.

Commerce, as thus permitted, is a pestilence and a scourge. We can hardly presume to despise the Chinese, while their impenetrable isolation shuts out the wars, as well as the arts, of more refined communities. But when it shall embrace the round of nations in a general commercial pacification, founded, not so much in treaties, as in those primordial principles of mutual convenience, which constitute the only permanent basis of national intercourse, the barbarous and the civilized will alike have reason to rejoice.

It seems probable that an entire change in the commercial machinery of the globe is at hand. Without a particular reference to the policy or the power of any one state, it is evident that so many have been driven to a due appreciation of the advantages of foreign trade, that they must finally compel a relinquishment of its monopoly by any one. The fourth dynasty of France may be precarious; but the impulse and policy it has originated will continue. In the north of Europe a great empire, and on this side of the Atlantic a powerful republic, are yet but developing those resources and principles, every effort of which will be directed, by a natural concert, infinitely stronger than any national compact, to the removal of all obstacles to the freedom of the seas.