COMMERCE KNITS MANKIND

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 82, 3 October 1936, Page 8

COMMERCE KNITS MANKIND

Letters and commerce meet so often arid so prosaically in trade supplements that one is liable to forget that these are by no means the ■■ only literary laurels that have been pressed upon the modest brows of merchant princes. Long ago, in the reign of Good . Queen Anne, Joseph Addison, essayist and man of letters, wrote one of literature's finest tributes to trade and industry; and it seems to be opportune, •on the occasion of the great Commerce Congress now silting in Wellington City, to glance back to 1711 and see how matters then stood on the eve of an industrial era that even in pre-Hanoverian times was not unforeseen. Addison, be it noted, became under George I one of the commissioners for trade and the colonies, a fact that people of the Empire outposts do not sufficiently remember —perhaps because ', his appointment is usually regarded as a mere political reward for the essayist's defence of the Hanoverian succession. Yet Joseph Addison was on more than nodding terms with trade and with the traffic of the oceans, in which Britain from Elizabeth's day s had, been no mean contender. ' "Our ships," he wrote in 1711, "are laden with the harvest of every climate; our tables are stored with spices and oils and wines; our rooms are filled with pyramids of China and adorned with workmanship of Japan." , Those were the days when the world was wide, a hundred and fifty, years before the Rising Sun began to rise in the distinctly coriimercial way that has somewhat altered the, emphasis on the word "Japanese." Addison did not write that the Rhine is our frontier, but he affirmed: The vineyards of France are pur gardens, the Spice Islands our hotbeds; the Persians are our weavers, and the Chinese our potters. Pointing out the inadequacies of the English climate for local production of" many fruits and products of warmer climes, he wrote that this drawback was cancelled by the unembargoed genius of shippers and merchants: Nature indeed furnishes us [the English] with the bare necessities of life; but traffic gives us a great variety of what' is useful, and at the same time supplies us with- everything that is convenient and ornamental. Good Queen Anne had not, up to that time, discovered any virtue in shutting out oranges and grapes and the fruits of the tropics, or' the textiles of the East. Evidently she had many lessons to learn . from New Zealand and Australia in political economy. Consequently Joseph Addison was able to march in elegant English to his happy conclusion, part of which might almost have been penned by Adam Smith: For these reasons there are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of Nature, find work for the poor, add wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great. . Surely this tribute is worthy of a man of letters and of a trade commissioner to George I. Perhaps there are British business men today who still open these pages of Addison and say good morning to themselves. Or perhaps they do not. But it is worth remembering that business has its Addison as well as its trade supplements. As we today look back to Queen Anne and George I through mists of time, so also did Addison in 1711 look back,through similar mists to the days of the feudal system —King, Barons, serfs. Under the magic of his fancy, the spirit of Runnymede invades the Stock Exchange of 1711, to see and to wonder: When I have stood upon 'Change I have often fancied one of our old kings standing in person where he is represented in effigy, and looking down upon the wealthy concourse of people with which that place is every day filled. . ~. How would he be surprised to hear all the languages of Europe spoken in this little spot of his former dominions, and to see so many private men who, in his time, would have been the vassals of some powerful baron, negotiating like princes for greater sums of money than were formerly to be met with in the royal treasury.

If such was the pageant of London's wealth in those pre-Rolhschild, preRockefeller, and pre-Ellerman days, what, on earth would Addison's king say if he came back today to London or New York, or even to Wellington? Here he would see—on a site that was bought 96 years ago from primitive Maoris for such considerations as 300 red blankets, 200 muskets, 72 spades, 60 red nightcaps, 144 jews' harps, 200 yards calico, etc. —a Parliament of Commerce representing a British Empire such as Addison and Queen Anne never dreamed of— a thing world-embracing, ocean-defy-ing, air-conquering, and annihilalive of distance.

"Trade," wrote Addison, "without enlarging the British territories, has given us a kind of additional empire." That was written 128 years before the Tory sailed from England, in defiance of the British Government, to carry out the Wakefield colonisation plans at Petone, Wellington, Nelson, or wherever the entrepreneurs could buy from the Maori the land alreiidy sold in London. Addison knew not a single one of the great Brilish Dominions or territories as we know them today—he died long before the conquests of Canada and India —yet already in the early eighteenth century the fair vision of a British Empire, based on maritime commerce, issues from his prescient imagination, adorned by his golden pen. Men who "knit mankind together" in a web of trade and commerce meet in this city today to ask why our ships are no longer "laden wilh the harvest of every climate"; why the countries of the world shut their doors upon one another: why even the units of the British Empire shut tariff doors and monetary doors upon

one another; why they limit one another's meats and viands, and embargo the apple of the earth and citrus fruits; in short —what has hapj>ened to the Addisonian golden legend. "There are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants," and, if the solution of the trouble is not found in the Congress at the Town Hall, shall it be found in the other Congress at Parliament Buildings? After all, the men of commerce have a longer pedigree than the men of politics. Long before the Greeks took up political philosophy people traded by barter to "distribute the gifts of Nature." It was in these prehistoric days that they made the classical discovery that trade (apart from headhunting) is not interested in men who are dead. The mountain savage possessing animal hides, and contemplating exchange with the valley savage owning surplus grain, might have been tempted to kill the other fellow, and thus own both hides andfigrain. This, indeed, often happened (and it happens today). But experience proved that if the lowland graingrower was murdered, no grain came to the mountains next year, with the. result that the grainless mountaineer starved while the fadeless valley savage shivered. Thus arose the great principle of live and let live. It is constantly lost and constantly rediscovered. Neither King John nor Queen Anne attained commercial perfection, nor has civilisation to date. In fact, it seems that in some respects Queen Anne was well ahead of us. -

The more commerce changes, the mofe it is the same. The first great traders (the Chinese) and the first great maritime traders (the Phoenicians), also the Greeks, the Romans, Venice, and the Hanseatic League knew all. the .trade tricks and most of the usury laws and economic nostrums that are current today. New Zeal anders may have thought recently that they saw original features in our public works administration, but Confucius, who lived about 500 B.C.

decreed that employment should be arranged according to the capacity and strength of the individual employed. He was very severe if work was done badly.

And Confucius himself is a mere modern, because, according to the author of "The Romance of Commerce," the Chinese had yoked the horse in 1950 B.C. And the same authority has it that "the Chinese discovered gunpowder, the making of paper, and the mariner's compass," but for some reason "the world was allowed to forget." Civilisation cannot again forget, unless civilisation dies through the agency of gunpowder and its successors. For that fate, the best antidote is the British Commonwealth and the comradeship of commerce, which we must first make actual among our own Empire units before handing on in the Addisonian spirit to the world at large.