The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance [25]
grenadiers and the English fleet, England would not today have its world-wide trade, and the United States of America would not exist. It is probable that French would now be spoken alike on the Ohio and the Mississippi, at Calcutta and Bombay. English commercial greatness and supremacy date from the successes of the war of 1756-1763. But the climax in its career of colonial conquest by force of arms, and of intentional destruction, dictated by trade jealousy, of the competing mercantile navies of France, Holland, Germany, and Denmark, was reached by Great Britain during the Napoleonic war. The commercial struggle between England and France, the shameless brutalities of the English fleet on the one side and the continental blockade on the other, form the terrible concluding drama in the age of commercial wars. Henceforward another spirit begins to make its way in commercial policy and in international morality; although the old traditions have not yet been entirely overcome, and, indeed, can never be entirely overcome, so long as there is such a thing as independent politico-economic life with separate national interests. The long wars, each lasting several years, or even decades, which fill the whole period from 1600 to 1800 and have economic objects as their main aim; the open declaration by the Grand Alliance in 1689 that their object was the destruction of French commerce; the prohibition by the Allies of all trade, even by neutrals, with France, without the slightest regard to international law; all this shews the spirit of the time in its true light. The national passion of economic rivalry had been raised to such a height that it was only in wars like these that it could find its full expression and satisfaction. To be content, in the intermediate years of peace, to carry on the conflict with prohibition, tariffs, and navigation laws instead of with sea fights; to give, as they did, in these years of peace, somewhat more attention to the infant voice of international law than in time of war - this was in itself a moderating of international passion. The very idea of international law is a protest against the excesses of national rivalry. All international law rests on the idea that the several states and nations form, from the moral point of view, one community. Since the men of Europe had lost the feeling of community that had been created by the Papacy and Empire, they had been seeking for some other theory which might serve to support it; and this they found in the re-awakening "law of nature." But the particular ideas for which in the first instance men strove, and for which they sought arguments pro et contra in the law of nature, were mainly products of the economic and commercial struggle then proceeding. Inasmuch as the states that were the first to obtain colonies on a large scale, Spain and Portugal, had secured from the Pope a partition of the whole oceanic world, and its designation by him as their exclusive property, the law of nature, when it made its appearance, put forward the doctrine of Mare liberum. But while in this way Hugo Grotius in 1609 created a legal justification for his Dutch fellow-countrymen in pushing their way into the old possessions of the Portuguese and Spaniards, the English maintained the opposite theory of Mare clausum, and of the exclusive lordship of England over the British seas, in order to free their necks from the competition of the Dutch in navigation and the fisheries. Denmark appealed to its sovereignty of the sea as a justification for its oppressive tolls at the Sound; and the other Baltic powers sought, on the same ground, to forbid the Great Elector to build a fleet. The great principle of the freedom of the sea did, indeed, slowly gain general currency; but at first each nation only recognised the particular theory that promised it some advantage. Almost all the wars of the time were waged in the name of the European "Balance." And who will deny that this idea had its justification, and that it laid the foundation for the peaceful future of a