Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XXXVI

The time was not ripe for any attack on England more direct than this; and to occupy the interval until it might become so, the well-worn scheme of harassing her at her extremities was revived. The uneasy Bonaparte was temporarily removed from the scene of administration by the Egyptian expedition, intended at least to menace English commerce in those distant parts of the earth, if not to work the complete ruin of her Oriental empire. But if the time was not ripe to engage in active hostilities for the enforcement of an economic doctrine, this fact was not due to the absence of such a doctrine, formulated and avowed. The theory of a closed jural state, which had been evolved in defense of the final stage in the formation of European nationality, was itself undergoing an expansion in the direction of expounding the international relations of states in commercial affairs. In 1801 Fichte published his famous treatise entitled "The Closed Commercial State," his contribution to the literature of Utopias. Defining the jural state as a limited body of men subject to the same laws and to the same coactive sovereignty, he declared that the same body of men ought to be stringently limited to like reciprocity of commerce and industry, and that any one not under the same legislative power and the same coactive force should be excluded from participation in this relation; thus would be formed a closed commercial state parallel to the closed jural state. His treatise was divided into three books, entitled respectively, "Philosophy," "Contemporary History," and "Politics," preceded by an introduction discussing the relation of the rational state to the real, and of pure public law to politics. The first book was merely an elaboration of his idea as to what is just and right within the rational state, in view of trade relations as they are; in the second book he proceeded to discuss the actual condition of commercial intercourse in existing states; and in the third book he considered how the theory of a closed commercial state was to be realized. The vital portion of his argument lay in the statement[40] that if all Christian Europe, with its colonies and factories in other quarters of the globe, was to be considered as a whole, trade must remain free as it once was; if, however, it was to be divided into several wholes, each under its own government, it must likewise be divided into several entirely closed commercial states. Said he: "Those systems which demand free trade, those claims to the right to buy and sell freely in the whole known world, have been handed down to us from among the ideas of our ancestors, for whom they were suited; we took them without examination and adopted them, and it is with trouble that we substitute others for them."