The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance [28]
would assuredly be anvil. The question in Germany in 1680-1780 was not whether a mercantilist policy was necessary and desirable; about that there was agreement, and properly so. The ideals of Mercantilism, though they may have been presented in an exaggerated form, and too sharply expressed in one-sided economic theories, meant, practically, nothing but the energetic struggle for the creation of a sound state and a sound national economy, and for the overthrow of local and provincial economic institutions; they meant the belief of Germany in its own future, the- shaking off of a commercial dependence on foreigners which was continually becoming more oppressive, and the education of the country in the direction of economic autarchy. The victories of the Prussian army served the same end as the financial and commercial policy of the state; between them they raised Prussia to a place among the Great Powers of Europe. The difficulties in the internal economic policy of the country consisted in this: that the Prussian state, instead of being a nation, included only a limited number of provinces; and that, at the same time as it adopted a protective system against France, Holland, and England, it also excluded its German neighbours. The real explanation is that the Prussian state was still but half-way out of the period of territorial development; was still, so to speak, in the earlier century of commercial disputes with Hamburg, Leipzig, and Danzig, with Poland, Saxony, and other neighbouring territories; and it could make use of its natural superiority, as compared with neighbours like these, only by binding its provinces together in an enclosed and exclusive combination. We have reached the end of these general considerations as to the historical significance of the mercantile system. Our argument rested on the proposition that, in spite of the fact that it is the individual and the family that labour, produce, trade, and consume, it is the larger social bodies which, by their common attitude and action, intellectual as well as practical, create all those economic arrangements of society, in relation both to those within and those without, upon which depend the economic policy of every age in general and its commercial policy in particular. We saw that the feeling and recognition of economic solidarity, in regard alike to those within and those without, necessarily created at the same time a corporate egoism. From this egoism the commercial policy of every age receives its impulse. We have, in the next place, laid emphasis on the proposition that historical progress has consisted mainly in the establishment of ever larger and larger communities as the controllers of economic policy in place of small. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seemed to us the birth hour of modern states and modern national economies; and, therefore, to have been necessarily characterised by a selfish national commercial policy of a harsh and rude kind. Whether such a policy was rightly directed in details depended on the information and sagacity of the personages who guided the state; whether it was to be justified as a whole, whether as a whole it had a probability of success, that depended, then as ever, on the question whether it accompanied a great upward-moving stream of national and economic life. The progress of the nineteenth century beyond the mercantilist policy of the eighteenth depends, - keeping to this thought of a succession of ever larger social communities, - on the creation of leagues of states, on alliances in the matter of customs and trade, on the moral and legal community of all civilised states, such as modem international law is more and more bringing into existence by means of a network of international treaties. But, of course, by the side of this stands another and not less important chain of connected phenomena, which also helps to explain the contrast between the nineteenth century on the one side, and the seventeenth and eighteenth on the other. The struggle of social bodies with one another,