You that mingle may.
Queerly enough some of the parties referred to, denounce the tariff men as but “half-educated,” while, perhaps, properly demanding themselves exclusive copyright protection for all of their own literary productions, whether ephemeral or abiding. It is right, they seem to think, to protect brains—and of these they claim the monopoly—but monstrous to protect muscles; right to protect the pen, but not the hoe nor the hammer.
Free trade would almost seem to be an aristocratic disease from which workingmen are exempt, and those that catch it are as proud of it as they would be of the gout—another aristocratic distinction.
It might be more modest for these “nebulous professors” of political economy to agree among themselves how to define and locate the leading idea of their “dismal science” whether in the value in exchange or value in use, in profits of capital or wages, whether in the desire for wealth or aversion to labor, or in the creation, accumulation, distribution and consumption of wealth, and whether rent is the recompense for the work of nature or the consequence of a monopoly of property, before they ask a doubting world to accept the flickering and much disputed theory of free trade as an infallible truth about which they have themselves never ceased to wrangle. The weight of nations against it is as forty to one. It may be safe to say that when sea-serpents, mermaids, and centaurs find a place in natural history, free trade will obtain recognition as a science; but till then it must go uncrowned, wearing no august title, and be content with the thick-and-thin championship of the “Cobden Club.”
THE BRITISH POLICY EVERYWHERE REJECTED.
All of the principal British colonies from the rising to the setting of the sun—India alone possibly excepted—are in open and successful revolt against the application of the free-trade tyranny of their mother country, and European States not only refuse to copy the loudly-heralded example, but they are retreating from it as though it were charged with dynamite. Even the London Times, the great “thunderer” of public opinion in Great Britain, does not refrain from giving a stunning blow to free trade when it indicates that it has proved a blunder, and reminds the world that it predicted it would so prove at the start. The ceremony of free trade, with only one party responding solitary and alone, turns out as dull and disconsolate as that of a wedding without a bride. The honeymoon of buying cheap and selling dear appears indefinitely postponed.
There does not seem to be any party coming to rescue England from her isolated predicament. Bismarck, while aiming to take care of the interests of his own country, as do all ministers, on this question perhaps represents the attitude of the greater part of the far-sighted statesmen of Europe, and he, in one of his recent parliamentary speeches, declared:
Without being a passionate protectionist, I am as a financier, however, a passionate imposer of duties, from the conviction that the taxes, the duties levied at the frontier, are almost exclusively borne by the foreigner, especially for manufactured articles, and that they have always an advantageous, retrospective, protectionist action.
Practically the nations of continental Europe acquiesce in this opinion, and are a unit in their flat refusal of British free trade. They prefer the example of America. Before self-confident men pronounce the whole world of tariff men, at home and abroad, “half-educated or half-witted,” they would do well to see to it that the stupidity is not nearer home, or that they have not themselves cut adrift from the logic of their own brains, only to be wofully imposed upon by free-trade quackery, which treats man as a mere fact, no more important than any other fact, and ranks labor only as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest or dearest markets.
So long as statesmen are expected to study the prosperity and advancement of the people for whose government and guidance they are made responsible, so long free-trade theories must be postponed to that Utopian era when the health, strength and skill, capital and labor of the whole human race shall be reduced or elevated to an entire equality, and when each individual shall dwell in an equal climate, upon an equal soil, freely pasture his herds and flocks where he pleases, and love his neighbor better than himself.