It is plain to reason and to all experience, that mutual Satisfactions are the ultimate thing in exchanges. Our present analysis can go no further, for the reason, that we have now reached in Satisfactions the end, for the sake of which all the previous processes have been gone through with. Persons do not engage in buying and selling for the mere pleasure of it, but always for the sake of some satisfactions derivable to both parties from the issue of it. Ordinary self-inspection and foresight and industry being presupposed, the issue of exchanges is just what was expected by the two persons, the satisfaction of each follows as a matter of course, and stimulates to new exchanges in ever-widening circles.
Since the desires of all men, which the efforts of other men can satisfy through exchange, are indefinite in number and unlimited in degree, there is no end of human Satisfactions to be reached along this road of reciprocal trade; and since the very object of all trade and the actual result of all trade (the exceptions are infinitesimal) is to multiply and reduplicate continually mutual Satisfactions among men; we can see right here what a loss and wrong it is, what a wanton destruction of possible human happiness it is, what a bar to progress among men in comforts and powers it is, for nations to impede and to prohibit commerce by legislation! As we shall see more fully in a later chapter, Governments can have no moral or constitutional right to restrict the trade of their people, except in the sole interest of revenue or health or morals.
Such is the constitution of the universe, that a really good thing is usually cognate with and inseparable from a good many other good things. Buying and selling, as we have now clearly seen, springs right out of the nature of men in the circumstances in which they are providentially placed on the earth, and ends in the satisfaction of innumerable wants common to all men. This makes trade a thoroughly good thing in itself; and consequently it is intimately associated with many other good things. The scriptural instance, that we have been examining, gives a neat illustration of this: "_and there was peace between Hiram and Solomon; and they two made a league together_." The mutually profitable exchange of commodities led to a feeling of amity between the two neighboring kings; the feeling of amity led to a treaty of Peace between the two adjacent nations; and the "_league_" so ratified not only kept out war from their borders, but also permitted the unhindered continuance of profitable exchanges between them.