The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

INTERNATIONAL PROSPERITY PROMOTES PEACE
Foreign trade is full of delusions. We ought to wish for every nation as large a 
degree of self-support as possible. Instead of wishing to keep them dependent 
on us for what we manufacture, we should wish them to learn to manu-
facture themselves and build up a solidly founded civilization. When every 
nation learns to produce the things which it can produce, we shall be able to 
get down to a basis of serving each other along those special lines in which 
there can be no competition. The North Temperate Zone will never be able to 
compete with the tropics in the special products of the tropics. Our country 
will never be a competitor with the Orient in the production of tea, nor with 
the South in the production of rubber.
A large proportion of our foreign trade is based on the backwardness of 
our foreign customers. Selfishness is a motive that would preserve that back-
wardness. Humanity is a motive that would help the backward nations to 
a self-supporting basis. Take Mexico, for example. We have heard a great 

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Things in General  •  219
deal about the “development” of Mexico. Exploitation is the word that 
ought instead to be used. When its rich natural resources are exploited for 
the increase of the private fortunes of foreign capitalists, that is not devel-
opment, it is ravishment. You can never develop Mexico until you develop 
the Mexican. And yet how much of the “development” of Mexico by foreign 
exploiters ever took account of the development of its people? The Mexican 
peon has been regarded as mere fuel for the foreign money-makers. Foreign 
trade has been his degradation.
Short-sighted people are afraid of such counsel. They say: “What would 
become of our foreign trade?”
When the natives of Africa begin raising their own cotton and the natives 
of Russia begin making their own farming implements and the natives of 
China begin supplying their own wants, it will make a difference, to be sure, 
but does any thoughtful man imagine that the world can long continue on 
the present basis of a few nations supplying the needs of the world? We must 
think in terms of what the world will be when civilization becomes general, 
when all the peoples have learned to help themselves.
When a country goes mad about foreign trade it usually depends on other 
countries for its raw material, turns its population into factory fodder, creates 
a private rich class, and lets its own immediate interest lie neglected. Here 
in the United States we have enough work to do developing our own country 
to relieve us of the necessity of looking for foreign trade for a long time. We 
have agriculture enough to feed us while we are doing it, and money enough 
to carry the job through. Is there anything more stupid than the United States 
standing idle because Japan or France or any other country has not sent us 
an order when there is a hundred-year job awaiting us in developing our own 
country?
Commerce began in service. Men carried off their surplus to people who 
had none. The country that raised corn carried it to the country that could 
raise no corn. The lumber country brought wood to the treeless plain. The 
vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. The pasture country 
brought meat to the grassless region. It was all service. When all the peoples