Thomas Paine

There can be no such thing as a nation flourishing alone in commerce: she can only participate; and the destruction of it in any part must necessarily affect all.

If they are poor she cannot be rich, and her condition, be what it may, is an index of the height of the commercial tide in other nations.

It is possible that a nation may be the carrier for the world, but she cannot be the merchant.

Could the government of England destroy the commerce of all other nations, she would most effectually ruin her own.

When the ability in any nation to buy is destroyed, it equally involves the seller.

Like blood, it cannot be taken from any of the parts, without being taken from the whole mass in circulation, and all partake of the loss.

Every kind of destruction or embarrassment serves to lessen the quantity, and it matters but little in what part of the commercial world the reduction begins.

As the two are nearly the opposite of each other, consequently, the uncivilised state of the European governments is injurious to commerce.

Commerce is no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of numbers; and by the same rule that nature intended for the intercourse of two, she intended that of all.

Whatever has a tendency to promote the civil intercourse of nations by an exchange of benefits, is a subject as worthy of philosophy as of politics.

The invention of commerce has arisen since those governments began, and is the greatest approach towards universal civilisation that has yet been made by any means not immediately flowing from moral principles.

If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilised state of governments.