The Corn Laws, as existing in 1846, went beyond this: and their alteration, not their abolition, was needed. Your free-trader’s argument is like that of a man who has discovered that too much water will drown, and proceeds at once to the other extreme of killing by thirst.
All extremes are bad. Free trade is an extreme. Want of competition is bad. Extreme competition is bad. Healthy competition is that which is wanted.
Unlimited competition defeats its own purpose by crushing out weaker industries, diminishing the supply, and enabling the successful competitors to raise their prices as soon as the rival industry has been extinguished.
Even Mill admits that protection may
“be defensible when imposed temporarily ... in hopes of naturalizing a foreign industry.”[17]
And Cossa allows that—
“At certain times, and under certain conditions, protection has given notable advantages to industrial organization and progress.... Colbert’s system and Cromwell’s Navigation Act, contributed not a little to the economic greatness of France and England.”[18]
There seems to be but little doubt that the political economist of the future will hold up England as an awful warning, but an instructive example, of a country ruined by the persistent misapplication of the principles of political economy.
Alexr. Hamilton, the greatest statesman America ever produced, says:—