mbridge University Press

Woodward, _Erasmus_. Cambridge University Press.

IX

COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES

Commerce and finance are departments of life in which mankind approaches
nearer to unity than in any other. They are practical expressions of the
instinct of self-preservation which is the first law of nature. They
spring straight from the acquisitiveness which is a universal
characteristic of human nature and indeed of animal and vegetable
nature. Every living thing wants to acquire food. Adam Smith indeed
restricts the trading instinct to mankind. 'The propensity', he says,
'to truck, barter, or exchange one thing for another ... is common to
all men and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know
neither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds in
running down the same hare have sometimes the appearance of acting in
some sort of concert. Each turns her towards his companion or endeavours
to intercept her when his companion turns her towards himself. This,
however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental
concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular
time. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one
bone for another with another dog.'[24]

Mr Cannan, in his edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, very judiciously
points out in a note on this passage that 'it is by no means clear what
object there could be in exchanging one bone for another'. Probably if
one rummaged the literature of dog stories one would find plenty of
examples of commerce between dogs, and when they perform tricks to get
food, we detect the germ of the exchange of a service for a commodity.

When a bee takes honey from a flower and leaves in exchange the pollen
from a flower of an opposite sex, it may be said to be at once a
merchant, a carrier, and a matrimonial agent, and the brilliant colours
with which flowers attract these merchants have been compared to the
advertising posters of the human trader. But however the case may be in
the animal and vegetable world, there can be no question that the
trading instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. In
boys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before they
feel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought to
religion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates how
Tom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which h