The great states of an earlier time display no commercial policy in the style of the mercantile system, not because the Utopia of a purely individualistic economic life possessed more reality then than later, but because they were not united economic bodies; as soon as they became such, the inheritance of such economic bodies as had previously existed, and, above all, of the town policy, passed over to them. It was not because money and money payments or industry or trade suddenly played an altogether new rile in the days of Cromwell and Colbert, that it occurred to people to guide the course of exportation and importation and colonial trade, and to subject them to governmental control. On the contrary, it was because just then, out of the earlier smaller communities, great national communities had grown up, whose power and significance rested on their psychological and social concert, that they began to imitate, not what Charles V had done in Spain, but what all towns and territories of earlier times had done, from Tyre and Sidon, from Athens and Carthage onward; to carry over what Pisa and Genoa, Florence and Venice, and the German Hanse towns had done in their time to the broad basis of whole states and nations. The whole idea and doctrine of the Balance of Trade, as it then arose, was only the secondary consequence of a conception of economic processes which grouped them according to states. Just as up to this time attention had been fixed on the exportation from and importation to particular towns and territories, so now people tried to grasp in their minds the trade of the state as a whole, and to sum it up in such a way as to arrive at a better understanding of it and at some practical conclusion. Such a grouping and combination were very evidently suggested in a country like England, where, on account of its insular position and the moderate size of the land, the national economy had early displayed its exports and imports, its supply of money and of the precious metals, as a connected whole to the eye of the observer.(33*)All economic and political life rests upon psychical mass-movements, mass-sentiments, and mass-conceptions, gravitating around certain centres. That age could begin to think and act in the spirit of free trade, which had left so far behind it the toilsome work of national development that it regarded its best results as matters of course, and forgot the struggle they had cost; an age which, with cosmopolitan sentiments, with great institutions and interests of international traffic, with a humanised international law, and an individualist literature everywhere diffused, was already beginning to live in the ideas and tendencies of a world economy (Weltwirthschaft). The seventeenth century had just managed to fight its way up from local sentiment to national sentiment; international law as yet scarcely existed. The old bonds which had held together Catholic states had been broken; all the intellectual movement of the time centred in the new national life; and the stronger and sounder beat the pulse of that life, the more it felt its individuality, the more inevitable was it that it should bar itself against the world outside with a harsh egoism. Each new political community that forms itself must be carried along by a strong and exclusive feeling of community; these are the roots of its strength. The struggle for self-sufficiency and independence is as natural to it as the spirit of violent rivalry which hesitates at nothing in order to come up with, to surpass, and to crush the rivals in whom it always sees enemies. It was the law of autarchy by which the commercial policy of those times was exclusively guided. The endeavour after autarchy naturally shews itself in an especially violent and one-sided form in the youth of nations.
The doctrine of the natural harmony of the economic interests of all states is just as false as the opinion then entertained that an advantage to one state is always a disadvantage to another. The latter was an opinion which not only had its roots in the earlier stubborn struggles between towns and territories, but was strengthened just at this time by the circumstance that the possession of colonies, of the Indian Spice Islands, and of the silver mines of America had fallen to the several nations only as the result of war and bloodshed. It seemed unavoidable that one nation should have to recede when another pressed in. In reality, all social bodies, and therefore economic bodies among them, - at first towns and districts, and afterwards nations and states, - stand to one another in a double relation; a relation of action and reaction by which they mutually supplement one another, and a relation of dependence, exploitation, and struggle for supremacy. The latter is the original one; and only slowly, in the course of centuries and millenniums, is the antagonism softened. Even to-day the great economic Powers seek to utilise their economic superiority in all their international relations, and to retain weaker nations in dependence; even to-day any half-civilised nation or tribe, among whom the English or French establish themselves, is in danger, first, of a sort of slavery for debt and an unfavourable balance of trade, and, following closely in the wake, of political annexation and economic exploitation, - though this, indeed, may turn into an economic education for it.
