Albert J. Beveridge Quotes

The British Empire (with the exception of a very short period in the 1930s) was a free trade empire, unlike all the other great empires of the world …. Anyone could trade with the British Empire.

Commerce is the weapon …., the all powerful arm with which we have entered in earnest, with every prospect of success, upon our conquest of Mexico.

No subject can better engage our attention than the promotion of trade and commerce at home and abroad. Domestic conditions are sure to be improved by larger exchanges with the nations of the world. We are already reaching out with good results. Our surplus products of agriculture and manufacture are finding a foreign market, and in the latter case to a degree which would not have been believed possible a quarter of a century ago. We have made wonderful progress in this direction, and have only just begun. Our manufactured products go to every nation of the world, and I hope the time may be not far distant when our ships, under the Stars and Stripes, will be on every sea where commerce is carried and the wants of mankind are to be supplied.

As our commerce spreads, the flag of liberty will circle the globe and the highway of the ocean–carrying trade to all mankind–will be guided by the guns of the republic. And as their thunders salute the flag, benighted people will know the voice of liberty is speaking, at last, for them ... that civilization is dawning at last, for them.

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation much follow him; and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations may by outraged in the process.

In the international world, when General Electric walks into the room, the Sixth Fleet walks in behind them.

One by one, trade and investment barriers will continue to be swept away by globalization, like leaves on an autumn day…The new challenge will be less to regulate relations among national economies, than to establish the rules and structures of a transnational economy.

lt is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

If we intend to have the trade of the world, … we must be in a capacity of serving all markets and all humours.

What my country needs is a safety valve for her surplus energies …. Establishing a Belgian colony in Africa will not only develop our country’s commercial interests but to raise the morale of the army and raise the merchant navy which we lack …. It is time that Belgium takes her part in the great work of civilization, following in the footsteps of England.

The greatness of the British nation is not owing to war and conquests, to enlarging its dominions by the sword, or subjecting the people of other countries to our power; but it is allowing to trade, to the increase of our commerce at home, and the extending it abroad.

In the long run, trade works for America.

In a trading nation, the bent of all the laws should tend to the encouragement of commerce, and all measures should be there taken, with a due regard to its interest and advancement.

Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence.

A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hand of private interests;

It must become a nation of free traders, which would throw open its ports to the world, and prove to European nations that the colonial system of restriction and monopoly was founded on delusion

If it is commercialism to want the possession of a strategic point giving the American people an opportunity to maintain a foothold in the markets of that great Eastern country [China], for God's sake let us have commercialism.

When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized. While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

The Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her Colonial trade against foreign competitors.

Our object is wholly new in the world. It is singular: it is grown up to this magnitude and importance within the memory of man; nothing in history is parallel to it… In this new system, a principle of commerce, of artificial commerce, must prevail.

If the United States will have a free commerce in this sea, they must defend it..

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade of each becomes more valuable to the other.

Young man, there is America -- which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.

The real danger of the Cotton dynasty lies not in the hostility of the North, but in the exigencies of the market abroad;.