The necessity thus arose for commercial treaties which should ensure the safety and proper treatment of commercial agents when any two powers agreed to exchange good offices. Edward II. made an agreement with Venice that its merchants and mariners should be permitted, _for ten years_, to come and go, and sell their merchandise in security, without having either their persons or goods stopped on account of other people’s crimes or debts. From the time of such partial relaxation,—such narrow openings to a foreign trade,—the wants of the multitude of each civilized people have forced one after another of the barriers raised by national jealousy, while all parties remained under the influence of the error that commerce is directly productive, and of course an advantage to be denied to enemies, except when a very hard bargain can be driven with them. Perhaps the most curious specimens in existence of attempts at mutual overreaching, of laborious arrangement to secure what must naturally happen, and of an expensive and tyrannical apparatus for achieving what is impossible, may be found in the commercial treaties from the infancy of commerce till now. The only idea which never seems to have struck the negotiators is, that commerce is valuable,—not because production takes place in the mere exchange of commodities,—but because systematic exchange facilitates the most extensive division of labour and the closest economy of capital,— advantages which must be shared by both if experienced by either of the exchanging parties. On the same principle that the shoemaker makes no hats, and the hatter no shoes, and that both find an advantage in supplying each other, without any new product arising from the mere act of exchange, the growers of tea and the makers of hardware respectively profit by supplying each other; and they can afford to employ an intermediate class, the merchants,—to conduct their traffic, since they can go on preparing their tea and grinding their cutlery, while the process of exchange is being transacted. The saving of capital is mutual also. It must be mutual and incalculable as long as the regions of the earth differ in their productions, yielding a superabundance in one place of some necessary or comfort which is rare in another. No commercial treaty bears the least reference to the obvious final purpose of all commerce;—that the greatest number shall obtain the largest amount of enjoyment at the least cost. Such a recognition of the ultimate principle would, indeed, be inconsistent with the very existence of commercial treaties, except as far as they relate to the personal protection of traders. But, while the people of each country have shown the most decided inclination to obtain more and more of what they cannot produce at home, the aim of governments, and generally of merchants, has been to sell as much as possible to other nations; to take from them as little as possible but money; and to get the