Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. COMMEKCE. It might seem as if the mutual benefit of exchanges were sufficiently demonstrated in the preceding chapters, which unfold their nature and processes. There are always two parties to every exchange, each of whom has something and wants something else, neither of whom is under any obligation whatever to part with what he has for what he wants, both of whom are in the very nature of the case the best judges both of what they have and of what they want, and it would certainly seem as if, so long as it is a matter of pure free-will and of personal advantage, and so long as the public morals, health, or revenue, are not infringed thereby, they might be allowed to make their exchange without let or hindrance on the part of anybody. The liberty to exchange does Dot compel anybody to exchange, does not recommend anybody to exchange, does not even bring any inducement of any kind to lead anybody to exchange; it simply permits those to exchange whose personal advantage in their bestjudgment would be promoted by an exchange. Common sense pronounces in favor of such liberty. Political Economy pronounces in favor of such liberty. But some governments, and notably the government of the United States at present, interfere with this liberty, practically deny the right of their people to exchange their own property for other forms of property in accordance with their own best judgment of their own advantage, and, putting up legal barriers across the path of exchange, announce pains and penalties for those who presume to part with what is their own for the sake of getting thereby what they want more. This action of governments, particularly of our own, makes it needful for us to examine more definitely still into the nature of Commerce, to investigate the alleged reason...