and by the craving for a life as fine and as distinguished as that of other peoples, to make necessaries of the wares produced in foreign parts which we could do without; if only we had made conditions tolerable for our free fellow-citizen in regard to the wares we can less easily do without, instead of wishing to draw a profit from the sweat and blood of a poor slave across the seas! Then, at any rate, we should not ourselves have furnished the pretext for our present fate; war would not have been waged against us as purchasers, nor would we have been ruined because we are a market-place. Almost ten years ago, before anyone could foresee what has since happened, the Germans were advised[1] to make themselves independent of world-trade, and to turn themselves into a closed commercial State. This proposal ran counter to our habits, and especially to our idolatrous veneration of coined metals; it was passionately attacked and thrust aside. Since then we have been learning, in dishonour and under the compulsion of a foreign power, to do without those things, and far more than those things, which we then protested we could not do without, though we might have done so then in freedom and with the greatest honour to ourselves. O, that we might seize this opportunity, since enjoyment at least is not corrupting us, to correct our ideas once for all! O, that we might at last see that all those swindling theories about world-trade and manufacturing for the world-market, though they suit the foreigner and form part of the weapons with which he has always made war on us, have no application to the Germans; and that, next to the unity of the Germans among themselves, their internal autonomy and commercial independence
- ↑ [In 1800 by Fichte himself, in Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (The Closed Commercial State).]
