Commerce forms a numerous class, friends of external peace and
internal tranquillity, who attach themselves to the established
government.
It creates great fortunes, which in republics become the origin of
the most forceful aristocracies. As a rule commerce enriches the
cities and their inhabitants, and increases the laboring and
mechanical classes, in opening more opportunities for the
acquirement of riches. To an extent it fortifies the democratic
element in giving the people of the cities greater influence in the
government. It arrives at nearly the same result by impoverishing
the peasant and land owner, by the many new pleasures offered him
and by displaying to him the ostentation and voluptuousness of
luxury and ease. It tends to create bands of mercenaries rather
than those capable of worthy personal service. It introduces into
the nation luxury, ease, and avarice at the same time as labor.
The manners and morals of a commercial people are not the manners of
the merchant. He individually is economical, while the general mass
are prodigal. The individual merchant is conservative and moral,
while the general public are rendered dissolute.
The mixture of riches and pleasures which commerce produces joined
to freedom of manners, leads to excesses of all kinds, at the same
time that the nation may display the perfection of elegance and
taste that one noticed in Rome, mistress of the world or in France
before the Revolution. In Rome the wealth was the inflow of the
whole world, the product of the hardiest ambition, producing the
deterioration of the soldier and the indifference of the patrician.
In France the wealth was the accumulation of an immense commerce and
the varied labors of the most industrious nation on the earth
diverted by a brilliant and corrupt court, a profligate and
chivalrous nobility, and a rich and voluptuous capital.
Where a nation is exclusively commercial, it can make an immense
accumulation of riches without sensibly altering its manners. The
passion of the trader is avarice and the habit of continuous
labor. Left alone to his instincts he amasses riches to possess
them, without designing or knowing how to use them. Examples are
needed to conduct him to prodigality, ostentation, and moral
corruption. As a rule the merchant opposes the soldier. One desires
the accumulations of industry, the other of conquest. One makes of
power the means of getting riches, the other makes of riches the
means of getting power. One is disposed to be economical, a taste
due to his labor. The other is prodigal, the instinct of his
valor. In modern monarchies these two classes form the aristocracy
and the democracy. Commerce in certain republics forms an
aristocracy, or rather an "extra aristocracy in the democracy."
These are the directing forces of such democracies, with the
addition of two other governing powers, which have come in, the
clergy and the legal fraternity, who assist largely in shaping the
course of events.