Despite all this similarity of views, Carey does not owe his inspiration to List. He was acquainted with the National System and he quoted it. But American economic literature had already supplied him with analogous suggestions. Even more than books, the economic life of America itself as it evolved before his very eyes had contributed to the formation of his ideas. It was the progress of America under a Protective régime, it was the spectacle of a country as yet entirely new and sparsely populated, increasing the produce of her soil as colonisation extended, and multiplying her wealth as population became more dense, that inspired him with the idea of a policy of isolation with a view to hastening the utilisation of those enormous resources. More fortunate than List, he saw his ideas accepted, if not by the scientific experts of his country (who on the whole remained aloof), at least by the American politician, who has applied his principles rather freely.[608]
Carey’s doctrine, accordingly, cannot be attributed directly to the influence of List. It remains to be seen whether List had any influence upon European doctrines.
He undoubtedly succeeded in forcing the acceptance of the idea of a temporary Protection for infant industries even upon Free Traders. The most notable convert to this view was John Stuart Mill.[609] But it was a somewhat Platonic concession that he made. He thought it inapplicable to old countries, for their education was no longer incomplete, and at best useful only for new countries.
Can modern Protectionists claim descent from List? In the absence of any systematic treatise dealing with their ideas, it is not always easy to glean the significance of their doctrines from the various articles, discourses, and brochures amid which they are scattered.[610] Neglecting those writers who are merely content to reproduce the old fallacies of the Mercantile arguments concerning the balance of trade,[611] the majority of them appear to base their case more or less explicitly upon two principal arguments: (1) the necessity for economic autonomy; (2) the patriotic necessity of securing a national market for national products.[612] These two points of view, which are more or less clearly avowed and accepted as political maxims, would, if applied with logical strictness, result in making all external commerce useless. Each nation would thus be reduced to using just those resources with which Nature had happened to endow it, but it could get little if any of the goods produced by the rest of mankind. These two ideas were not absolutely foreign to List’s thought, although they never assumed anything more than a secondary or subordinate character. He never considered them as the permanent supports of a commercial policy.
List frequently spoke of making a nation independent of foreign markets by means of industry. He considered that nation highest which “has cultivated manufacturing industry in all its branches within its territory to the highest perfection, and whose territory and agricultural production is large enough to supply its manufacturing population with the largest part of the necessaries of life and raw materials which they require.” But he also recognised that such advantages were exceptional, and that it would be folly for a nation to attempt to supply itself by means of national division of labour—that is, by home production—with articles for the production of which it is not favoured by nature, and which it can procure better and cheaper by means of international division of labour, or, in other words, through foreign commerce. Complete autonomy is accordingly an illusion. But we cannot deny that some of his expressions seem to give credit to the false idea that a country which obtains a considerable portion of its consumption goods from foreigners must be dependent upon those foreigners.[613] In fact, it is no more dependent upon the foreigner than the foreigner is upon it. In the case of a buyer and seller who is the dependent person? There is but one instance in which the expression is justified, and that is when a foreign country has become the only source of supply for certain commodities. Then the buyer does become dependent, and List rightly enough had in view the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England—a monopoly that no longer exists.
He also spoke of retaining the home market for home-made goods; but he thought that this guarantee would of necessity have to be limited to the period when a nation is seeking to create an industry for itself: at a later period foreign competition becomes desirable in order to keep manufacturers and workmen from indolence and indifference.[614]
At no period was List anxious to make economic autonomy or the preservation of the home market the pivot of his commercial policy. The creation of native industry is the only justification of protective rights, but this is the one point which modern Protectionists cannot insist upon without anachronism.
List left no marked traces of his influence either upon practical politics or upon Protectionist doctrines. It is in his general views that we must seek the source of his influence and the reason for the position which he holds in the history of economic doctrines.