couraged the payment for them in foreign goods. There are, however,
modern supporters of the assumption that it is more important to sell
than to buy, although the money received for sales has no other
significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be
imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes
of selling and of buying are complementary.

The economic explanation of the double falsehood of dividing buying
from selling and of imputing a higher value to the latter process, lies
beyond the scope of this address. But the injuries resulting from the
superior pressure upon governments of organized bodies of producers and
merchants who have things to sell, to the detriment of the consuming
public who have only buying needs, are too grave matters to be
neglected here. It is not too much to say that, if the interests of
consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of
governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a
peaceful, harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the
suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by
the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private
interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other
single circumstance.

This analysis has seemed necessary in order to clear away the
intellectual and moral fogs which prevent a true realization of the
economic, and therefore the moral, interdependence of nations. For
every bond of economic interest involves moral obligation also. If it
is true that the fabric of commercial relations is all the time being
knit closer between the different peoples of the earth, then the moral
isolation and the antagonism which earlier statecraft inculcated, and
which still obsess so many minds, must be dissipated and give place to
active sentiments of human cooeperation.

There were, indeed, those who thought that already the web of commerce
and finance had been woven strong enough to save nations from the
calamity of war. Their miscalculation arose from underestimating the
power over the mind and the passions of that false image of trade. But
because the modern internationalism of commerce and finance did not
prove strong enough to stem the full and sudden tide of war passions
fed from the barbarous traditions of a dateless past, we ought not to
disparage the potentiality of this internationalism as the foundation
of a new and be