Source identified1
Image design Golden Hour
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“As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce, whence arose the grandeur of the State.”
Meaning & context
Voltaire argues that commercial wealth and political freedom reinforced one another in the England he was describing, connecting economic activity with civic power.
Source details
Letters on England, Letter X, “On Trade,” Project Gutenberg #2445, transcribed from the 1894 Cassell & Co. edition. Voltaire argues that English trade contributed to civic freedom and that freedom in turn extended commerce. The sentence is preserved as an eighteenth-century translated historical and political-economic argument, not a universal economic law or current empirical finding.