Allow me, Sir, to give an instance tending to show how unaccountably individuals deceive themselves, and imagine themselves to be somewhat rapidly mending their condition, while they ought to be persuaded that, by that infallible standard, the balance of trade, they are on the high road to ruin.  Some years ago, in better times than the present, a ship left one of the towns of New England with 70,000 specie dollars.  She proceeded to Mocha, on the Red Sea, and there laid out these dollars in coffee, drugs, spices, and other articles procured in that market.  With this new cargo she proceeded to Europe; two thirds of it were sold in Holland for $130,000, which the ship brought back, and placed in the same bank from the vaults of which she had taken her original outfit.  The other third was sent to the ports of the Mediterranean, and produced a return of $25,000 in specie, and $15,000 in Italian merchandise.  These sums together make $170,000 imported, which is $100,000 more than was exported, and is therefore proof of an unfavorable balance of trade, to that amount, in this adventure.  We should find no great difficulty, Sir, in paying off our balances, if this were the nature of them all.

The truth is, Mr. Chairman, that all these obsolete and exploded notions had their origin in very mistaken ideas of the true nature of commerce.  Commerce is not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others.  It has not the tendency necessarily to impoverish one of the parties to it, while it enriches the other; all parties gain, all parties make profits, all parties grow rich, by the operations of just and liberal commerce.  If the world had but one clime and but one soil; if all men had the same wants and the same means, on the spot of their existence, to gratify those wants,—­then, indeed, what one obtained from the other by exchange would injure one party in the same degree that it benefited the other; then, indeed, there would be some foundation for the balance of trade.  But Providence has disposed our lot much more kindly.  We inhabit a various earth.  We have reciprocal wants, and reciprocal means for gratifying one another’s wants.  This is the true origin of commerce, which is nothing more than an exchange of equivalents, and, from the rude barter of its primitive state, to the refined and complex condition in which we see it, its principle is uniformly the same, its only object being, in every stage, to produce that exchange of commodities between individuals and between nations which shall conduce to the advantage and to the happiness of both.  Commerce between nations has the same essential character as commerce between individuals, or between parts of the same nation.  Cannot two individuals make an interchange of commodities which shall prove beneficial to both, or in which the balance of trade shall be in favor of both?  If not, the tailor and the shoemaker, the farmer and the smith, have hitherto very much misunderstood their own interests.  And with regard to the internal trade of a country, in which the same rule would apply as between nations, do we ever speak of such an intercourse as prejudicial to one side because it is useful to the other?  Do we ever hear that, because the intercourse between New York and Albany is advantageous to one of those places, it must therefore be ruinous to the other?