Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Civilization." Society and Solitude. Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870, p. 21.
He had introduced a bill to provision a military garrison at the mouth of the Columbia River on the West Coast and protect and develop trade with China and India. President Monroe was for it and he persuaded the House to vote for it, but the bill to encourage foreign free trade with the Orient died in the Senate. Floyd was another American ahead of his time. . Floyd was very modern in his economic views, so much so that he, even as a Southern politician, opposed slavery on the grounds that it was economically inefficient and the South would never develop industrially if it had no incentive, as existed in the North and England, to reduce the amount of labor required for economic opportunity. He was right on that point as well.
Shaw carefully reported on the customs, laws, and traditions of foreign trade with China. He counted 43 European ships that landed in Canton in 1887 full of goods to trade and left full as well.
Burke was one of the few in England who predicted economic and commercial success of America.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
