granting commercial preferences: do not even make alliances for the sake of purchasing such preferences, nor enter into any treaties for ensuring them. Such preferences are useless: 'they add nothing to the mass of wealth; they only influence the direction of it'.
'Mark well the contrast. All trade is in its essence advantageous—even to that party to whom it is least so. All war is in its essence ruinous; and yet the great employments of government are to treasure up occasions of war, and to put fetters upon trade.'
Therefore it is necessary to begin by trying to remove the causes of war, It is necessary to narrow the sphere of operation of jealousy—the vice of the narrow mind, and to expand that of confidence—the virtue of the enlarged mind. 'Clandestinity and secrecy' in negotiation are unnecessary and mischievous.[1] Establish conditions as favourable as possible in regard to interest and in the conduct of affairs between nations, and thus prepare the ground and the atmosphere appropriate to an international tribunal that is to be The Tribunal of Peace. Even then force may have to be used. 'There might, perhaps, be no harm in regulating, as a last resource, the contingent to be furnished by the several states for enforcing the decrees of the court', for the court will have power to put the refractory State, after a certain time, under the ban of Europe.
Bentham made the practical inception of his Plan depend upon the maintenance and permanence of friendly relations between Britain and France; and already the younger Pitt had repudiated, both in words and by deeds, the rooted
- ↑ 'I lay down two propositions: 1. That in no negociation, and at no period of any negociation, ought the negociations of the cabinet in this country to be kept secret from the public at large; much less from parliament and after inquiry made in parliament. 2. That whatever may be the case with preliminary negociations, such secrecy ought never to be maintained with regard to treaties actually concluded.' Works, ii, p. 554.
