One of the cardinal principles of British free-traders is, “Buy where you can buy cheapest, and sell where you can sell dearest,” and that is precisely what they mean. They expect to buy of us cheapest and sell to us dearest. It is the only logical outcome of the whole policy. We are to be the victims of sharpers, whether we sell or buy. One-half of this resounding phrase, “buy where you can buy cheapest,” often appears to touch the pocket nerve of those who, having nothing to sell, derive their income from capital, or from a fixed salary, and they forget that their capital or their salary might have been much smaller had it not been for the greater prosperity and compensation which protection has given to labor and to all business enterprises. Some part of this class are accustomed to make periodical journeys through foreign lands, and as they often bring home more or less of esthetic rarities, they feel aggrieved that such expensive luxuries, which, if cheap and common, would have had no attractions for them, often happen to be among the very tidbits upon which it is the fitting policy of a republican form of government to levy revenue. The tax falls upon those able to pay. No country on the globe sends out so many foreign travelers with a spendable surplus, as the United States, or that scatter their money more generously, not to say extravagantly. English reciprocity in pleasure travel, however, like their often proposed commercial reciprocity, is comparatively jug-handled. They come singly; we go in droves and caravans.
AMERICA VINDICATED BY THOSE WHO COME TO STAY.
But if foreign countries send comparatively an unequal number of visitors tending to reimburse the abounding expenditures of Americans abroad, they do send us a far more numerous if not valuable company who come to stay, bringing both fortunes and affections, and adding, as they have added within the past two years, over a million and a quarter of brave hearts and willing hands to the productive forces of the country. Their tracks are all one way. None go back and none come here as drones, for such stay away to absorb honey already stored; but the “tenth legions,” so to say, of all the conscripted armies of Europe, in health and fit for any service, are rushing to our shore on the “waves of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long,” as volunteers for life. Were we to drop protection this western exodus would cease and the emigrants now here would be relegated to the same scale of wages from which they so anxiously attempted to escape.
These facts are pregnant arguments annually reproduced, upholding the American policy of protection, and show that those who expect to earn their living—tempted, it is true, by the highest rewards, and tempted by free schools for their children—know where to find the largest opportunities for the comforts of life, for happiness and intellectual progress; and know also that America is not and never intends to be a transatlantic Ireland nor an agricultural back lot of Europe.
COMMERCIAL RULES NOT A SCIENCE.
We have some worthy literary professors of free trade and some hacks who know their master’s crib “of quick conception and easy delivery,” as John Randolph would have described them, who, having determined that the sun shall hereafter rise in the west, assume for their doctrines, like their English masters, the basis of absolute science, which they insist shall be everywhere accepted, regardless of all conditions, wants, or circumstances, as the latest revelation of economic truth; but free trade fails, shamefully fails, to stand the admitted tests of an exact science, as its results must ever be both an inconsistent quantity and incapable of prediction. It yields to the condition of nations and of the seasons, to war, to time, and constantly yields to facts. The blackboard compels universal assent to mathematics, and the laboratory offers the same service to chemistry; but any test or analysis of free trade yields nothing but polemical vagaries, and it may appropriately be consigned to the witches’ cauldron with—
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.
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Mingle, mingle, mingle,