Britain has, more than from almost any other one cause, attained her present commercial supremacy. Again, if the facts constituting the basis for the second reason are as alleged, commercial isolation and restriction are no remedy for them. Commercial intimacy between nations is always productive of political good-fellowship, as isolation and restriction are of enmity; and for promoting amity with Mexico the modern drummer is likely to prove, for the present, a far better missionary than either the diplomatist or the soldier; and, as for the third, one might think that a precedent had been borrowed by the committee from China, where commercial intercourse with the United States itself, in common with Europe, was, until very recently, combated on the ground that the inhabitants of these countries were "foreign devils," with whom the enlightened Chinese ought not to be brought in contact.
In respect to the fourth reason, the language of the report of the committee reads as follows: "We open to Mexico a trade with sixty million people. We receive, in return, the advantage of trading, to a limited extent, with a comparatively small, heterogeneous population of ten million. We offer them a trade more valuable than that of any other nation of the globe."
