FREE-TRADE PROSPERITY ON THE WANE.
It gives me no pleasure to notice retrograde steps in the prosperity of Great Britain; and, if some evidence of this sort is brought out, like that of the five thousand houses now marked “To let” in Sheffield and ten thousand in Birmingham, it will have no other purpose than to show that free trade has failed to secure the promised supremacy to English manufactures. The avowal of Mr. Gladstone that the additional penny to the income tax produces less revenue than formerly indicates a positive decrease of wealth; and the steady diminution of British exports since 1873, amounting in 1880 to one hundred and sixty million dollars, with a diminution in the total of exports and imports of two hundred and fifty million dollars, is more conclusive proof as well of British decadence as of the advancement of other nations.
COMMERCIAL PROTECTION.
The sum of our annual support bestowed upon the Navy, like that upon the Army, may be too close-fisted and disproportionate to our extended ocean boundaries, and to the value of American commerce afloat; yet whatever has been granted has been designed almost exclusively for the protection of our foreign commerce, and amounts in the aggregate to untold millions. Manufacturers do not complain that this is a needless and excessive favor to importers; and why, then, should importers object to some protection to a much larger amount of capital, and to far greater numbers embarked certainly in an equally laudable enterprise at home?
THE FREE-TRADE PROPAGANDISTS OF ENGLAND.
For the last thirty-five years England has been making extraordinary efforts, political, industrial, legislative, diplomatic, social, and literary, all combined, to persuade mankind to follow her example of reversing that policy of protection, supreme in her Augustan age, or from Queen Anne down throughout the Georgian era, and the policy maintained by Chatham, by the younger Pitt, and by Canning with an energy that created and sustained the most varied and extensive workshops of the world. Already mistress of the ocean and abounding in wealth, the sea-girt Island aspired to a world-wide monopoly of trade. Penetrated with this later free-trade ambition, and not infrequently accused of trying to make all England tributary to Manchester, and all the rest of the world tributary to England, the eloquent Mr. Bright, who grandly rejected any idea of a new nation in America, resorts even to the infelicitous language of passion when he denounces his opponents, as he does, by declaring that any looking toward protective legislation anywhere in the world is proof either of “congenital depravity or defect of judgment.” Let us be thankful it is no worse, for what would have happened if the wrathful Englishman had said “total depravity?”
The repeal of the corn laws was not for the benefit of foreign nations, but solely for the benefit of Englishmen.
First. It was their belief that their skill and great capital gave them that superiority which would secure them against all competition except that arising from cheaper food.
Second. The cheaper-fed workmen of Germany, France, and America presented the only competition not to be resisted, and it had to be at once squarely met. Protection was abandoned, and abandoned possibly forever, but abandoned because the laboring British population had become too great and too hungry, with over a million and a half of paupers, when measured by the supply of home-grown food. Some of the little Benjamins must go to Egypt for corn. Starving men do little work, but occasionally do too much. The sole conditions to the continuance of the dense population and the grand scale of British manufactures in competition with modern nations appeared to be parsimony and privation, or lower-priced bread and lowest-priced labor. With these partially secured there came a season of temporary relief, but, unfortunately, with no increase of wages. It was barely success at the cost of an alliance with the discontent of underpaid workmen, with strikes and organized expatriation. Free trade, it is found, grinds labor to the bone, and forces it to fly, with muscles and machinery, to more inviting fields.
British agriculture, long depressed and chronically exposed to bad harvests, is now threatened with ruin by foreign competition, and British manufactures also seem almost as destitute of sunshine as their agriculture, though still owning a reluctant allegiance to the laws of the universe and to the exact science of the garrulous Bonamy Price. Lord Derby, in a late speech to the Lancashire farmers, recommended that some of the farmers should emigrate—five millions, I believe, he proposed—and those who might remain, said he, will then be able to farm on better terms.