If men could divest themselves of the sentiment of rivalry and hostility between different nations, they would perceive that the matters in which the interests of different nations coincide immeasurably outweigh those in which they clash; they would perceive, to begin with, that trade is not to be compared to warfare; that the man who sells you goods is not doing you an injury.  No one considers that the butcher and the baker are his enemies because they drain him of money.  Yet as soon as goods come from a foreign country, we are asked to believe that we suffer a terrible injury in purchasing them.  No one remembers that it is by means of goods exported that we purchase them.  But in the country to which we export, it is the goods we send which are thought dangerous, and the goods we buy are forgotten.  The whole conception of trade, which has been forced upon us by manufacturers who dreaded foreign competition, by trusts which desired to secure monopolies, and by economists poisoned by the virus of nationalism, is totally and absolutely false.  Trade results simply from division of labor.  A man cannot himself make all the goods of which he has need, and therefore he must exchange his produce with that of other people.  What applies to the individual, applies in exactly the same way to the nation.  There is no reason to desire that a nation should itself produce all the goods of which it has need; it is better that it should specialize upon those goods which it can produce to most advantage, and should exchange its surplus with the surplus of other goods produced by other countries.  There is no use in sending goods out of the country except in order to get other goods in return.  A butcher who is always willing to part with his meat but not willing to take bread from the baker, or boots from the bootmaker, or clothes from the tailor, would soon find himself in a sorry plight.  Yet he would be no more foolish than the protectionist who desires that we should send goods abroad without receiving payment in the shape of goods imported from abroad.

The wage system has made people believe that what a man needs is work.  This, of course, is absurd.  What he needs is the goods produced by work, and the less work involved in making a given amount of goods, the better.  But owing to our economic system, every economy in methods of production enables employers to dismiss some of their employees, and to cause destitution, where a better system would produce only an increase of wages or a diminution in the hours of work without any corresponding diminution of wages.

Our economic system is topsyturvy.  It makes the interest of the individual conflict with the interest of the community in a thousand ways in which no such conflict ought to exist.  Under a better system the benefits of free trade and the evils of tariffs would be obvious to all.