If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue with an Australian or American Protectionist, we find ourselves in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments against the compelling people by act of Parliament to consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as soon as they are urged. If you attempt to prove that Protection is bolstered up by those whose private interests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd Australian diggers and the calculating Western farmers in America—men whose pocket interest is wholly opposed to Protection, and who yet, almost to a man, support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection to me in this way: he said he knew that under a protective tariff he had to pay dearer than would otherwise be the case for his jacket and his moleskin trowsers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing he aided in building up in the colony such trades as the making up of clothes, in which his brother and other men physically too weak to be diggers could gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying Protection of the Australian diggers is of the character of that which would be accorded to the glaziers of a town by the citizens, if they broke their windows to find their fellow-townsmen work: “We know we lose, but men must live,” they say. At the same time they deny that the loss will be enduring. The digger tells you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss, but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old country would be pocket loss, in a new country such as his only comes to this—that it forms a check on immigration. Wages being 5s. a day in Victoria and 3s. a day in England, workmen would naturally flock into Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell to 3s. 6d. or 4s.. Here comes in prohibition, and by increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting into the Australian handicraftsman‘s margin of luxuries, and reducing his wages to 4s., diminishes the temptation to immigration, and consequently the influx itself.
The Western farmers in America, I have heard, defend Protection upon far wider grounds: they admit that Free Trade would conduce to the most rapid possible peopling of their country with foreign immigrants; but this, they say, is an eminently undesirable conclusion. They prefer to pay a heavy tax in the increased price of everything they consume, and in the greater cost of labor, rather than see their country denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their political institutions endangered by a still further increase in the size and power of New York. One old fellow said to me: “I don‘t want the Americans in 1900 to be 200 millions, but I want them to be happy.”
The American Protectionists point to the danger that their countrymen would run unless town kept pace with country population. Settlers would pour off to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by cropping it year after year without fallow, without manure, and then, as the land became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to future settlement, when its lands should have recovered their fertility, by some other and more provident race. The coastlands of most ancient countries are exhausted, densely bushed, and uninhabited. In this fact lies the power of our sailor race: crossing the seas, we occupy the coasts, and step by step work our way into the upper country, where we should not have attempted to show ourselves had the ancient population resisted us upon the shores. In India, in Ceylon, we met the hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we had already fixed ourselves upon the coast, with a safe basis for our supply. The fate that these countries have met is that which colonists expect to be their own, unless the protective system be carried out in its entirety. In like manner the Americans point to the ruin of Virginia, and if you urge “slavery,” answer, “slavery is but agriculture.”
Those who speak of the selfishness of the Protectionists as a whole, can never have taken the trouble to examine into the arguments by which Protection is supported in Australia and America. In these countries, Protection is no mere national delusion; it is a system deliberately adopted with open eyes as one conducive to the country‘s welfare, in spite of objections known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly, it is at all events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice, illustrative of a certain nobility in the national heart. The Australian diggers and Western farmers in America are setting a grand example to the world of self-sacrifice for a national object; hundreds of thousands of rough men are content to live—they and their families—upon less than they might otherwise enjoy, in order that the condition of the mass of their countrymen may continue raised above that of their brother toilers in Old England. Their manufactures are beginning now to stand alone, but hitherto, without Protection, the Americans would have had no cities but seaports. By picturing to ourselves England dependent upon the City of London, upon Liverpool, and Hull, and Bristol, we shall see the necessity the Western men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against New York and Philadelphia. In short, the tendency, according to the Western farmers, of Free Trade, in the early stages of a country‘s existence, is to promote universal centralization, to destroy local centers and the commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with the cost of transport to the distant centers, consequent upon the absence of local markets, that he can grow but wheat and corn continuously, and cannot but exhaust his soil. With markets so distant, the richest forest lands are not worth clearing, and a wave of settlement sweeps over the country, occupying the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once more.
Protection in the colonies and America is to a great degree a revolt against steam. Steam is making the world all one; steam “corrects” differences in the price of labor. When steam brings all races into competition with each other, the cheaper races will extinguish the dearer, till at last some one people will inhabit the whole earth. Coal remains the only power, as it will probably always be cheaper to carry the manufactured goods than to carry the coal.
Time after time I have heard the Western farmers draw imaginary pictures of the state of America if Free Trade should gain the day, and asking of what avail it is to say that Free Trade and free circulation of people is profitable to the pocket, if it destroys the national existence of America; what good to point out the gain of weight to their purses, in the face of the destruction of their religion, their language, and their Saxon institutions.
One of the greatest of the thinkers of America defended Protection to me on the following grounds: That without Protection, America could at present have but few and limited manufactures. That a nation cannot properly be said to exist as such, unless she has manufactures of many kinds; for men are born, some with a turn to agriculture, some with a turn to mechanics; and if you force the mechanic by nature to become a farmer, he will make a bad farmer, and the nation will lose the advantage of all his power and invention. That the whole of the possible employments of the human race are in a measure necessary employments—necessary to the making up of a nation. That every concession to Free Trade cuts out of all chance of action some of the faculties of the American national mind, and, so doing, weakens and debases it. That each and every class of workers is of such importance to the country, that we must make any sacrifice necessary to maintain them in full work. “The national mind is manifold,” he said; “and if you do not keep up every branch of employment in every district, you waste the national force. If we were to remain a purely agricultural people, land would fall into fewer and fewer hands, and our people become more and more brutalized as the years rolled on.”
It must not be supposed that Protection is entirely defended upon these strange new grounds. “Save us from the pauper-labor of Europe,” is the most recent as well as the oldest of Protectionist cries. The Australians and Americans say, that by working women at 1s. a day in the mines in Wales, and by generally degrading all laborers under the rank of highly-skilled artisans, the British keep wages so low, that, in spite of the cost of carriage, they can almost invariably undersell the colonists and Americans in American and Australian markets. This state of degradation and poverty nothing can force them to introduce into their own countries, and, on the other hand, they consider the iron manufacture necessary for the national purpose alluded to before. The alternative is Protection.
The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Protection—namely, that no human government can ever be trusted to adjust protective taxation without corruption—is no objection to the prohibitions which the Western Protectionists demand. The New Englanders say—“Let us meet the English on fair terms;” the Western men say that they will not meet them at all. Some of the New York Protectionists declare that their object is merely the fostering of American manufactures until they are able to stand alone, the United States not having at present reached the point which had been attained by other nations when they threw Protection to the winds. Such halting Protectionists as these manufacturers find no sympathy in Australia or the West, although the highest of all Protectionists look forward to the distant time when, local centers being everywhere established, customs will be abolished on all sides, and mankind form one great family.
The chief thing to be borne in mind in discussing Protection with an Australian or an American is that he never thinks of denying that under Protection he pays a higher price for his goods than he would if he bought them from us, and that he admits at once that he temporarily pays a tax of 15 or 20 per cent. upon everything he buys in order to help set his country on the road to national unity and ultimate wealth. Without Protection, the American tells you, there will be commercial New York, sugar-growing Louisiana, the corn-growing Northwest, but no America. Protection alone can give him a united country. When we talk about things being to the advantage or disadvantage of a country, the American Protectionist asks what you mean. Admitting that all you say against Protection may be true, he says that he had sooner see America supporting a hundred millions independent of the remainder of the world than two hundred millions dependent for clothes upon the British. “You, on the other hand,” he says, “would prefer our custom. How can we discuss the question? The difference between us is radical, and we have no base on which to build.”