Although Wollstonecraft spends much of "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" musing on nature and its connection to the self, a great deal of the text is actually about the debasing effects of commerce on culture. She argues, for example, that the damage done to Hamburg and France by mercenaries and an increasingly commercial culture is far greater than the damage caused by the violence of the French revolution, writing that "the sword has been merciful, compared with the depredations made on human life by contractors, and by the swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad". Wollstonecraft believed that commerce "embruted" the mind and fostered a selfish disposition in its practitioners. Commerce should be, she thought, "regulated by ideas of justice and fairness and directed toward the ideals of independence and benevolence".