Lunchtime Must-Read: John Stuart Mill: War and Commerce

Corey Robin sends us to John Stuart Mill: War and Commerce: “But the economical advantages of commerce…

are surpassed in importance by those of its effects which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Commerce is now what war once was, the principal source of this contact.