Leadership Quote by Peter Schuyler

“Safe for business” sounds like a bland civic virtue, but in Schuyler’s mouth it’s a political talisman: security framed not around citizens, faith, or crown, but around commerce. The key move is the throat-clearing qualifier, “In and of itself.” It signals defensiveness before the argument even arrives, as if Schuyler knows the phrase can read like a confession: that public power is being justified by private profit. He’s pre-empting the moral objection and narrowing the debate to a supposedly neutral baseline. Who could be against safety? Who could be against business?

The subtext is that “business” is standing in for a whole governing class. Schuyler, a major New York colonial figure in a world of trading networks, land speculation, and imperial rivalry, is talking about stability for merchants, creditors, and property holders - the people whose prosperity could be counted, taxed, and leveraged. “Country” becomes less a shared civic body than a jurisdiction worth protecting because it’s economically productive.

Context matters because the late 17th and early 18th centuries were defined by frontier conflict, shifting imperial control, and the messy fusion of public office with private interest. To keep the “country safe” often meant militarizing borders, regulating trade, and managing alliances - policies that could be sold as collective security while concentrating benefits upward.

The line works rhetorically because it’s modest while smuggling in a worldview: prosperity as patriotism, governance as risk management for capital. It’s not exactly cynical; it’s a revealing glimpse of how early modern politics learned to speak in the calm voice of “reasonable” economics.