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she will, prevent our supplying them by our own industry. She would give us a comparatively small quantity cheap, and we could go without the balance. This is the only kind of abundance () which free trade ever can produce for the United States.

This is the abundance which free trade gives to India. In that country are to be found 200,000,000 of people of a highly acute and industrious race. To be on a par with the United States, their annual product should be about $25,000,000,000 in value. It is in reality far less than a tenth of that sum; and every few years there is (now in this, then in that province) a famine that carries off from one to two millions of human creatures. And what advantage does Great Britain obtain from this deplorable condition of affairs? The pitiful advantage of selling in India some $120,000,000 worth of English products, and making thereon perhaps a profit of $25,000,000. Where England profits a dollar, India foregoes producing a thousand.*

Similar has been the effect of English free trade upon Ireland, Portugal, and Turkey, and upon her own colonies. Deductive reasoning leads directly to the conclusion that the only way in which the British Islands, with 30,000,000 of people, can be the workshop of the world, is by preventing the world from helping itself; and, on the other hand, the imagination would fail to picture the magnificence of her empire after a period of fifty years, should she set herself resolutely to the task of developing in Ireland, in India, and in the colonies the arts and sciences which she herself possesses. She has a heart large enough to adopt so beneficent a policy. She does not do so, because sophistical arguments have fixed upon her a belief which future ages will wonder at, as we now wonder at her once equally unanimous belief in the existence of witchcraft.

REVIEW

OF

BASTIAT'S SOPHISMS OF PROTECTION.

THE preface tells us that "the primary object of the League is to educate public opinion, to convince the people of the United States of the folly and wrongfulness of the protective system." It quotes Senator Morrill as saying that "the year 1860 was a year of as large production and as much general prosperity as any, perhaps, in our history"; but these words would probably bear a different aspect if read with the context, as the condition of that year was very differently described by H. C. Carey as follows:

"What it is which may be positively affirmed in reference to that fluctuation of policy which struck down the great iron manufacture, at the moment at which it had just begun to exhibit its power for good, would seem to be this: that in the British monopoly system which thereafter followed, we added something less than forty per cent. to our population; seventy, to our machinery for water transportation; and five hundred, to that required for transportation by land; meanwhile materially diminishing the quantity of iron applied to works of production. When you shall have carefully studied all this, you may perhaps find yourself enabled to account for the facts, that in the closing year of the free trade period, railroad property that had cost more than a thousand millions could not have been sold for three hundred and fifty; that ships had become ruinous to nearly all their owners; that factories, furnaces, mills, mines, and workshops had been everywhere deserted; that hundreds of thousands of working men had been everywhere seeking, and vainly seeking, to sell their labor; that

immigration had heavily declined; that pauperism had existed to an extent wholly unknown since the great free trade crisis of 1842; that bankruptcies had become general throughout the Union; that power to contribute to the public revenue had greatly diminished; and finally, that the slave power had felt itself to have become so greatly strengthened as to warrant it in entering on the Great Rebellion."

So much for one of the premises of the preface. Another of the premises is a quotation from Miss Martineau made to show that the superiority of Great Britain in manufactures was not attained by means of protection, but that protection had brought Great Britain to the verge of ruin in 1842.

But the superiority of Great Britain was gained long before 1842. The troubles at that time were the result of overtrading, of over-pushing of the manufacturing industries. Sir Robert Peel afterwards lost his head, and yielded to the Free Trade League, who were waging war upon the landowners, and seeking to make the prosperity of England hang, as Carlyle forcibly said, upon being able to manufacture cottons a farthing a yard cheaper than other people. The millocracy triumphed over the landowners, and, fortunately for England, the gold of California and Australia brought about a general improvement in trade, which postponed the consequences for a long period. But they are seen now in Ireland, and may soon be seen in England. Meanwhile free trade has not prevented scenes in England quite equal to those pictured by Miss Martineau. They occurred from 1866 to 1870; but quotations would needlessly swell this article.

The preface adds,

"Again, it is said there is need of diversifying our industries, as though industry would not diversify itself sufficiently through the diverse tastes and predilections of individuals, as though it was necessary to supplement the work of the Creator in this behalf by human enactments founded upon reciprocal rapine."

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The "work of the Creator" and "reciprocal rapine are good rhetoric: they are not logic. They take for granted the question which is to be proved.

The pretty alliteration

might delight a doctrinaire: it would produce no effect upon the masculine judgment of a Napoleon, against whom Bastiat modestly puts himself.

We come now to Chapter I., entitled, "Abundance,Scarcity."

Throughout this chapter M. Bastiat supposes that abundance and cheapness are necessarily coexistent. He does not know, or he does not appear to know, that a low price is perfectly compatible with great scarcity; that abundance exists only where a large supply is co-existent with a large effective demand; that it is in vain to offer things for a little money to one who has no money, and no work by which to earn money. At the end he says:—

....

"But it is answered, if we are inundated with foreign goods and produce, our coin will leave the country. Well, and what matters that? Man is not fed with coin. He does not dress in gold, nor warm himself with silver. What difference does it make whether there be more or less coin in the country, provided there be more bread in the cupboard, more meat in the larder, more clothing in the press, and more wood in the cellar?"

Yes! provided; but how would it be provided there was much less of all these things?

Did not M. Bastiat know that the very fact of the coin leaving the country proved that the home industries were not adequate to pay for the importations, and that these must therefore cease as soon as the coin was exhausted? A country has perchance four thousand millions of mechanical and manufactured products, the result of its own industry. It hankers after cheapness, and opens its ports. It is deluged. It gets products at first more cheaply. But the industries in which it has an advantage furnish only, OR can be taken only to the extent of, one thousand millions. When its treasure is gone, it must satisfy itself with one thousand millions. These it may or may not thereafter get cheaply. Probably it will get them very dearly by reason of the low price at which it will have to sell what previously, with a fully employed population, it could use itself. But whether

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it gets its small pittance cheaply or dearly, it must go without the other three thousand millions. This is what it will get for mistaking cheapness for abundance.

Bastiat concludes as follows:-
:-

"To restrictive laws I offer this dilemma,- Either you allow that you produce scarcity, or you do not allow it. If you allow it, you confess at once that your end is to injure the people as much as possible. If you do not allow it, then you deny your power to diminish the supply, to raise the price, and consequently you deny, having favored the producer. You are either injurious or inefficient. You can never be useful."

M. Bastiat evidently thought he had used brilliant logic. But restrictive laws have for their object to produce abundance, and they effect their object: if they raise the price, they increase in a much greater degree the effective demand, the ability to pay the price. The limitation of the foreign market makes it simply impossible to employ the whole working force of the United States upon those industries in which it has a decided advantage. The rest must be employed upon fields, less advantageous perhaps, but infinitely more advantageous than living in the poorhouse or helping somebody do what he can perfectly well do alone.

Napoleon hit the mark when he said that "if an empire were made of adamant, the economists would grind it to powder."

Bastiat desires the consumer to have everything offered to him at a cheap rate; he is entirely indifferent about his having or not having the means of buying. buying. In fact, the consumer of the free trader was described by Homer, under the name of Tantalus :

"Then Tantalus along the Stygian bounds;

Pours out deep groans; with groans all hell resounds.

From circling floods in vain refreshment craves,

And pines with thirst amidst a sea of waves;

When to the water he his lip applies,

Back from his lip the treacherous water flies.

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