David A. Wells, in Free Trade, said:
A powerful argument in favor of free trade between nations is, that of all agencies it is the one most conducive to the maintenance of international peace and to the prevention of wars. The restriction of commercial intercourse among nations tends to make men strangers to each other, and prevents the formation of that union of material interests which creates and encourages in men a disposition to adjust their differences by peaceful methods rather than by physical force. On the other hand, it requires no argument to prove that free trade in it fullest development tends to make men friends rather than strangers for the more they exchange commodities and services the more they become acquainted with and assimilated to each other; whereby a feeling of interdependence and mutuality of interest springs up, which, it may be safely assumed, does more to maintain amicable relations between them than all the ships of war that ever were built or all the armies that ever were organized.
Richard Cobden said:
I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall set on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace. . . . I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies—for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labor—will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary or to be used, when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labor with his brother man.
Henry Ward Beecher said, in 1883:
The fundamental doctrine of Christianity is that all men are brethren. The fundamental doctrine of protectionism is that all men are not brethren. Christianity teaches that all men, in all parts of the world, should love each other. Protectionism teaches that all men on one side of an imaginary line should hate, or at least disregard, all who live on the other side of that line. Not only so, but protectionism teaches Christians to hate their fellow Christians more than they do pagans. We do not build up our tariff against heathen countries. . . . The moment the missionaries have, with infinite pains, taught the converted pagan to make anything fit to send to this market, we hasten to build up a high tariff wall to keep it out.
J. Novicoro, a great Russian writer, said, in 1903:
Freedom in the exchange of commodities alone can safeguard the interests of the nations. Since they are all interested in the inauguration of the same commercial policy, their solidarity is manifest and their supposed antagonism, in this particular matter of trade, is a delusion proceeding from the misapprehension of the real play of the economic forces involved.
Lord Kromer, Sir Lyon Playfair, Professor John Bascom, Professor William G. Sumner, Henry George, J. E. Thorold Rogers and other
