The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign / Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished

by Henry Charles Carey

This little community forms part of a larger one, styled a nation, the members of which are distant hundreds or thousands of miles from each other, and here we find difficulties tending greatly to limit the power to trade. The man in latitude 40° may have labour to sell for which he can find no purchaser, while he who lives in latitude 50° is at the moment grieving to see his crop perish on the ground for want of aid in harvest. The first may have potatoes rotting, and his wagon and horses idle, while the second may need potatoes, and have his lumber on his hands for want of means of transportation—yet distance forbids exchange between them.

Again, this nation forms part of a world, the inhabitants of which are distant tens of thousands of miles from each other, and totally unable to effect exchanges of labour, or even of commodities, except of certain kinds that will bear transportation to distant markets. Commerce tends, therefore, to diminish in its amount with every circumstance tending to increase the necessity for going to a distance, and to increase in amount with every one tending to diminish the distance within which it must be maintained. As it now stands with the great farming interest of the Union, the proportions are probably as follows:—

Exchanges in the family………………. 55 per cent.
" in the neighbourhood………… 25 "
" in the nation………………. 15 "
" with other nations………….. 5 "
—-
Total……………………………… 100

It will now be obvious that any law, domestic or foreign, tending to interfere with the exchanges of the family or the neighbourhood, would be of more serious importance than one that should, to the same extent, affect those with the rest of the nation, and that one which should affect the trade of one part of the nation with another, would be more injurious than one which should tend to limit the trade with distant nations. Japan refuses to have intercourse with either Europe or America, yet this total interdiction of trade with a great empire is less important to the farmers of the Union than would be the imposition of a duty of one farthing a bushel upon the vegetable food raised on their farms to be consumed in their families.

The great trade is the home trade, and the greater the tendency to the performance of trade at home the more rapid will be the increase of prosperity, and the greater the power to effect exchanges abroad. The reason of this is to be found in the fact that the power of production increases with the power of combined exertion, and all combination is an exchange of labour for labour, the exchange being made at home. The more exchanges are thus effected the smaller is the number of the men, wagons, ships, or sailors employed in making them, and the greater the number of persons employed in the work of production, with increase in the quantity of commodities produced, and the power to exchange grows with the power to produce, while the power to produce diminishes with every increase in the necessity for exchange. Again, when the work of exchange is performed at home, the power of combination facilitates the disposal of a vast amount of labour that would otherwise be wasted, and an infinite number of things that would otherwise have no value whatever, but which, combined with the labour that is saved, are quite sufficient to make one community rich by comparison with another in which such savings cannot be effected. Virginia wastes more labour and more commodities that would have value in New England, than would pay five times over for all the cloth and iron she consumes.

Again, the quantity of capital required for effecting exchanges tends to diminish as commerce comes nearer home. The ship that goes to China performs no more exchanges in a year than the canal-boat that trades from city to city performs in a month; and the little and inexpensive railroad car passing from village to village may perform almost twice as many as the fine packet-ship that has cost ninety or a hundred thousand dollars. With the extension of the home trade, labour and capital become, therefore, more productive of commodities required for the support and comfort of man, and the wages of the labourer and the profits of the capitalist tend to increase, and commerce tends still further to increase. On the other hand, with the diminution of the power to effect exchanges at home, labour and capital become less productive of commodities; the wages of the labourer and the profits of the capitalist tend to decrease, and trade tends still further to diminish. All this will be found fully exemplified among ourselves on a comparison of the years 1835-36 with 1841-42, while the contrary and upward tendency is exemplified by the years 1845-6 and 7, as compared with 1841-2.

The fashionable doctrine of our day is, however, that the prosperity of a nation is to be measured by the amount of its trade with people, who are distant, as manifested by custom-house returns, and not by the quantity of exchanges among persons who live near each other, and who trade without the intervention of ships, and with little need of steamboats or wagons. If the trade of a neighbourhood be closed by the failure of a furnace or a mill, and the workman be thus deprived of the power to trade off the labour of himself or his children, or the farmer deprived of the power to trade off his food, consolation is found in the increased quantity of exports—itself, perhaps, the direct consequence of a diminished ability to consume at home. If canal-boats cease to be built, the nation is deemed to be enriched by the substitution of ocean steamers requiring fifty times the capital for the performance of the same quantity of exchanges. If the failure of mills and furnaces causes men to be thrown out of employment, the remedy is to be found, not in the revisal of the measures that have produced these effects, but in the exportation of the men themselves to distant climes, thus producing a necessity for the permanent use of ships instead of canal-boats, with diminished power to maintain trade, and every increase of this necessity is regarded as an evidence of growing wealth and power.

The whole tendency of modern commercial policy is to the substitution of the distant market for the near one. England exports her people to Australia that they may there grow the wool that might be grown at home more cheaply; and we export to California, by hundreds of thousands, men who enjoy themselves in hunting gold, leaving behind them untouched the real gold-mines—those of coal and iron—in which their labour would be thrice more productive. The reports of a late Secretary of the Treasury abound in suggestions as to the value of the distant trade. Steam-ships were, he thought, needed to enable us to obtain the control of the commerce of China and Japan. "With our front on both oceans and the gulf," it was thought, "we might secure this commerce, and with it, in time, command the trade of the world." England, not to be outdone in this race for "the commerce of the world," adds steadily to her fleet of ocean steamers, and the government contributes its aid for their maintenance, by the payment of enormous sums withdrawn from the people at home, and diminishing the home market to thrice the extent that it increases the foreign one. The latest accounts inform us of new arrangements about to be made with a view to competition with this country for the passenger traffic to and within the tropics, while the greatest of all trades now left to British ships is represented to be the transport of British men, women, and children, so heavily taxed at home for the maintenance of this very system that they are compelled to seek an asylum abroad. In all this there is nothing like freedom of trade, or freedom of man; as the only real difference between the freeman and the slave is, that the former exchanges himself, his labour and his products, while the latter must permit another to do it for him.

Mr. McCulloch regards himself as a disciple of Adam Smith, and so does Lord John Russell. We, too, are his disciple, but in The Wealth of Nations, can find no warrant for the system advocated by either. The system of Dr. Smith tended to the production of that natural freedom of trade, each step toward which would have been attended with improvement in the condition of the people, and increase in the power to trade, thus affording proof conclusive of the soundness of the doctrine; whereas every step in the direction now known as free trade is attended with deterioration of condition, and increased necessity for trade, with diminished power to trade. Those who profess to be his followers and suppose that they are carrying out his principles, find results directly the reverse of their anticipations; and the reason for this may readily be found in the fact that the English school of political economists long since repudiated the whole of the system of Dr. Smith, retaining of it little more than the mere words "free trade."

The basis of all commerce is to be found in production, and therefore it was that Dr. Smith looked upon agriculture, the science of production, as the first pursuit of man, and manufactures and commerce as beneficial only to the extent that they tended to aid agriculture and increase the quantity of commodities to be converted or exchanged, preparatory to their being consumed. He held, therefore, that the return to labour would be greater in a trade in which exchanges could be made once a month than in another in which they could only be made once in a year, and he was opposed to the system then in vogue, because it had, "in all cases," turned trade,