The first steam-engine is supposed to have been employed at Manchester in 1790, where there are now, it is stated, in daily use within a circuit of ten miles more than fifty thousand boilers, yielding a total force equal to the power of one million horses, and the combined steam-power of Great Britain is represented to be equal to the manual labor of twice the number of males living on the globe. We greatly admire the prodigious enterprise of Great Britain, and it would be strange if, with our immensely greater coal-fields, it should let Americans sleep.
THE THEORY.
Free trade, as a theory, unembarrassed by contact with practical affairs, and divorced from any idea of supplying other equal and legitimate sources of revenue for the support of governments, appears wonderfully simple and seductive. Tearing down custom-houses, as a knock-down argument, is held to be scientific, but it is not conclusive. Some schoolmen, innocent of earning even a coat or a pair of shoes by the sweat of the brow, and sage without experience, adopt the theory because it is an article of faith—saving without works—with a ready-made catechism in imported text-books, and requires no comprehensive investigation of the multiform and ever-varying facts and exigencies in national affairs; but when the theory comes to be practically applied alike to all times, places and conditions of men, it obviously becomes political quackery, as untenable and preposterous as it would be to insist upon clothing all mankind in garments of the same material, in summer or winter, and of equal cut and dimensions, whether for big men or little, on the Danube or on the Mississippi. But however free trade comes to America, it comes as a strait-jacket, and whether new or second-hand, it is equally a misfit and unacceptable.
The affairs of communities are subject to endless differences from age to age and year to year, and governments that do not recognize these differences are either stupid or tyrannical, and deserve to be superseded or overthrown. In 1816 the sound policy of England, as Lord Brougham declared, was to stifle “in the cradle those infant manufactures in the United States which the war had forced into existence.” In 1824 the policy, according to Huskisson, was “an extension of the principle of reducing duties just so far as was consistent with complete protection of British industry.” In 1846 duties upon most foreign manufactures had almost ceased to yield any revenue, and Sir Robert Peel was forced to listen to the cry for cheap bread, though he was teased almost to the fighting point by the fertile, bitter, and matchless sarcasms of Disraeli, who also said: “The time will come when the working classes of England will come to you on bended knees and pray you to undo your present legislation.”
At this moment important changes of public opinion seem to be going on abroad, and the ponderous octavos of Malthus, Ricardo, McCulloch, and Mill may have some repose. What may have been found expedient yesterday may be fraught with mischief to-day, and he that has no distrust of an inflexible free-trade hobby will turn out to be, unwittingly perhaps, as has been well said, “a friend of every other country but his own,” and find at last that he has rejected the solid school of experience only to get astride of an imported catch-word, vainly imagining he is bottomed on a scientific and universal principle. Daniel Webster declared, “I give up what is called the science of political economy. There is no such science. There are no rules on these subjects so fixed and invariable that their aggregate constitutes a science.”
PRACTICE VERSUS THEORY.
But English free trade does not mean free trade in such articles as the poor require and must have, like tea and coffee, nor in tobacco, wines and spirituous liquors. These articles they reserve for merciless exactions, all specific, yielding a hundred millions of revenue, and at three times the rate we levy on spirits and more than five times the rate we levy on tobacco! This is the sly part of the entertainment to which we are invited by free-traders.
In 1880 Great Britain, upon tobacco and cigars, mainly from the United States, valued at $6,586,520, collected $43,955,670 duties, or nearly two-thirds as much as we collect from our entire importations of merchandise from Great Britain.
After all, is it not rather conspicuous hypocrisy for England to disclaim all protection, so long as she imposes twenty-nine cents per pound more upon manufactured tobacco than upon unmanufactured, and double the rate upon manufactured cocoa of that upon the raw? American locomotives are supposed to have great merit, and the foreign demand for them is not unknown, but the use of any save English locomotives upon English railroads is prohibited. Is there any higher protection than prohibition? And have not her sugar refiners lived upon the difference of the rates imposed upon raw and refined sugars? On this side of the Atlantic such legislation would be called protection.