efforts towards industry made by any other nation." International trade promoted international peace, once it was understood that all nations shared in its fruits. Abundance annulled the first law of social life under scarcity, that individuals or nations prosper only at their neighbors' expense. "Ignorant nations," Bentham said, had "treated each other as rivals, who could only rise upon the ruins of one another." Fortunately the work of Adam Smith had now made it clear, according to Bentham, that "commerce is equally advantageous for all nations— each one profiting in a different manner, according to its natural means." The Wealth of Nations showed that "nations are associates and not rivals in the grand social enterprise." Smith's argument in favor of free trade offered a special application of the general principle, as Bentham put it, that "the interests of men coincide upon more points than they oppose each other." As men came to understand this principle and its far-reaching implications, they would adjust their actions accordingly, relaxing their habitual attitude of jealousy and suspicion. "The more we become enlightened, the more benevolent shall we become."

The hope that the "interest of mankind at large" would come to prevail over the "spirit of rivalship and ambition which has been common among nations," as Richard Price put it, now appeared to rest on solid facts, not on wishful thinking. Only unenlightened economic policies, together with the lingering effects of popular prejudice, stood in the way of international understanding. "If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable," Tom Paine declared in The Rights of Man, "it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivil state of governments." The eighteenth-century philosophers prided themselves on their superiority to the narrow patriotism that generated so much ill will among nations. "You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture," Goethe said. Lessing held that patriotism was the "prejudice of the people." Samuel Johnson's view of patriotism—"the last refuge of the scoundrel"—is still quoted; but the same view was expressed, if not always so succinctly, by all those whose writings made the eighteenth century synonymous with the Age of Reason. Hume maintained, "The vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes: and having once established it as a principle, that many people are knavish or cowardly or ignorant, they will

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