Quote (Mr_Goodchild)
we've received enough letters of concern from the various merchants of the Cronese Mandate voicing their concern that they would be targeted merely for being Cronese, that they have themselves decided not to leave Mandate space.
Senator Cambrist,
I'm grateful for your efforts and for the apparent conclusion of what we may call the Chandaar crisis. The Cronese government (which still hasn't responded to me) deserves credit for the concession it has made. But as a brief followup, the above quotation from Senator Goodchild is odd to me. As a Cronese merchant who runs an import-export business, I have no hesitation at all to export Cronese goods to the rest of the galaxy. I'm not ethnically Cronese, but none of the (many) ethnically Cronese merchants I know are deterred in the least from the exportation of Cronese goods elsewhere. Never once has there been a threat to Cronese merchant vessels from the Auril Sector or anywhere else that I know of. Even Embaril welcomed Cronese goods.
Free trade is in everyone's interest, and I'm not sure the Cronese government is appreciating the separability of economics from politics and the disinterest of merchants in these political and ethnic disputes. Threats to Cronese naval vessels are not threats to merchant vessels, and none of the Cronese merchants I know see it that way.
I hope this is helpful.
Regards to you, Sir.