Foreign Commerce » 
cover much more surely than any government can, how and where 
capital and labour can be employed to the most profit : and as I 
regard the aggregate of the wealth of the citizens, to be synony- 
mous, with the wealth of the nation, it can seldom be wise for the 
administrators of national concerns to interfere in this respect, 
either by encouragement or prohibition. For many still stronger 
reasons, Commerce, ever clamorous for protection, is never worth 
protecting. In proportion as any employment of capital calls for 
national assistance and protection, it deserves none. The very de- 
mand itself, amounts to demonstrative evidence that the invest- 
ment is injudicious, and ought to be abandoned. But of all em- 
ployments of capital, that which calls for navies to guard it, and 
hourly jeopardizes the peace of the nation, deserves the least. 
We are now unfortunately reduced to such a situation, that a 
navy for the defence of our coast, and a standing army for the 
defence of our frontier, seem permanently necessary : for it will be 
madness, after the experience of the revolutionary war and the 
present war, to trust to raw undisciplined militia, suddenly called 
from the plowshare to the bayonet. 
For this state of things, we are indebted to the commercial 
system ; of which every hour and every event that passes, evin- 
ces to me the danger and the cost. What is the origin of the 
present war in which we are involved l First, Great Britain, in April 
1806, by the paper blockade of the Em s and the Weser ; and 
again in May 1806, by a similar blockade from the Elbe to 
Brest; then France, in retaliation, by the Berlin decree of No- 
vember 1806; then Great Britain by her orders in council of 
March and November 1807 ; then France by the Milan decree of ; 
December 1807 ; then Great Britain by her blockade of Cartha- 
gena; and then France by her decree of Bayonne, depredated on 
our commerce, under principles of blockade, perfectly new to the 
law of nations. Not satisfied with these acts of injustice, the two 
belligerents played into each others hands, by means of the license 
trade , to annihilate the commerce of America, and allowed to each 
other, being mutually at war, that very commerce they refused to 
us, with whom they were at peace. Doubtless neither on the one 
side or the other of the powers at war, can thus conduct be defend- 
ed : but our course certainly was, to let our merchants know, that 
if it was worth their while to engage in a traffic liable to so many 
interruptions, they might ; if not, they might let it alone ; and the 
people at home must be content to dispense with luxuries, intro- 
