CHAPTER X FOREIGN TRADE AND FOREIGN FOOD
We have heard a great deal lately about the danger of losing our foreign trade, and it has been very openly suggested that the only hope of keeping our foreign trade lies in reducing the wages of our British workers. Sometimes this idea is wrapped up, and called "reducing the cost of production."
Now, if we must have foreign trade, and as much of it as we have now, and if we can only keep it by competing against foreign dealers in price, then it is true that we must try to reduce the cost of production.
But as there are more ways of killing a dog besides that of choking him with butter, so there are other ways of reducing the cost of production besides that of reducing the wages of our British workers.
But on that question I will speak in the next chapter. Here I want to deal with foreign trade and foreign food.
It is very important that every worker in the kingdom should understand the relations of our foreign trade and our native agriculture.
The creed of the commercial school is that manufactures pay us better than agriculture; so that by making goods for export and buying food from abroad we are doing good business.
The idea is, that if by making cloth, cutlery, and other goods, we can buy more food than we can produce at home with the same amount of labour, it pays us to let the land go out of cultivation and make Britain the "workshop of the world."