True enough; but what a cold, sunless, and desperate remedy is that! If not Roman decimation, at least a sentence of banishment, crushing out the sweetest affections planted in human hearts, their love for their birthplaces, the homes of their fathers! But if these ill-fated men have barely supported life by the pittances daily earned, by what means, at whose cost, can they be transported to better and more welcome homes? The advice of Lord Derby is like that of the children of Marie Antoinette when the populace of Paris were clamoring for bread. Said the children: “Why don’t they buy cake?” Equally “child-like and bland” is Lord Derby. It would seem, when over 40 per cent. of their yearly imports must be of food, that the British Islands are too small for the foundations of the empire. The grand pyramid stands upon its apex reversed.
English statesmen have not forgotten the reservation of Sir Robert Peel, the author of the free-trade bill in 1846: “I reserve to myself,” said he, “distinctly and unequivocally the right of adapting my conduct to the exigencies of the moment and to the wants of the country;” and that is all protectionists ever claim to do.
Already Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of the Tory opposition in the House of Commons, is on the fence, and only ventures to favor “universal free trade.” That is surely a horse of another color, not Wellington’s “Copenhagen,” but more like Sancho Panza’s “Dapple.”
The recent reaction or change in many organs of British opinion shows that this right of adaptation to the exigencies of the moment is neither surrendered nor obsolete. Let me cite an extract from an influential paper, called the Observer:
There is no obligation upon us to incur industrial martyrdom for the sake of propagating free-trade principles, even supposing their truth to be as self-evident as we fondly imagined. Moreover, to speak the honest truth, we are beginning to doubt how far the creed to which we pinned our faith is so self-evident as we originally conceived. If we can persuade other nations to follow our example, then free trade is unquestionably the best thing for England. It does not follow, however, that it is the best thing for us, if we are to be left the sole adherents of free trade in the midst of a community of nations devoted to protection.
The Observer does not say, as will be seen, that it is best for other nations, but only, if they will follow her example, “unquestionably the best thing for England;” and that will not be disputed.
Other nations, however, seem to prefer to profit by the earlier English example, displayed for seventy years after Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared, and free trade, like the favorite English plum-pudding, is now called for by nobody but themselves, and is getting so cold as to be unpalatable even at home. Yet it is proposed by the amateur statesmen of our urban free-trade clubs, guiltless of any drop of perspiration in the paths of industry, to arrest American development by copying this foreign example, and thus bring our home labor and all of its rewards down to the European and Asiatic level. Nevertheless, I have faith that we shall abide in the track of the principles and politics which elevate and give character to American citizens, surrounding them with the daily presence and beauty of the useful arts, which so largely add to the power and dignity of any people in the great family of nations. To limit the industrial forces of an active, inventive, and ingenious people to agriculture alone, excluding manufactures and the mechanic arts, would be little better than in time of war to restrict an army to infantry alone, to the exclusion of cavalry and artillery. Great battles are not often so won.
A diversity of pursuits makes a great nation possible in peace, and greater in war. General competence, habits of self-reliance, and higher culture are thus more surely obtained. The improvement in one occupation is contagious, and spreads to all others. Philosophy, politics, and liberty all go up higher, and the happiness and dignity of mankind are promoted.
It is an axiom of British free-trade economy that for any branch of manufactures to rest on safe foundations it is indispensable that both the raw material and the skilled labor required should be indigenous. This seems to be a rule intended to fence out of the field all nations where either the raw material or the skilled labor called for is not native and abundant; but, if applied where the raw material is not indigenous, the British Islands would be stripped of a great share of their industry. Nor can any nation claim a class of men as born with a monopoly of skilled endowments; these, at any rate, are not “congenital,” and trades must be taught by long apprenticeships; but raw materials are usually planted by nature, and climate and soil fix and determine inflexible boundaries. Cotton is not indigenous in the British Islands, though their accomplished cotton manufactures have made it the leading article of commerce, leading their national policy. Hemp and silk, also, are the products of other lands. Having no timber or lumber good enough for ships, it is all brought, like their royal timber, from any place in the world but home. The steel used at Sheffield for cutlery is made from iron imported from Sweden and Norway; and no fine or merino wool consumed is of home growth. Not a little of the best machinery now alive in England had its birth on this side of the Atlantic, and must be credited to American genius.
The title of the British Islands to all the raw material, and to exclusive and hereditary mechanical skill among men, is widely contested, and the world will not fold its arms unresistingly to any such pretentious domination. The power of steam, though marvelously developed by English cleverness, is an auxiliary force belonging of right to the whole human race, as much as gravity or electricity, wherever its service may be called for, and its abode can no more be exclusively monopolized than that of the Promethean fire stolen from Heaven.