of soils by inducing a more diversified system of culture and rotation of crops, which can only be practiced where markets are near. This applies also to exhaustion of forests, fish, mineral treasures, and all bulky raw materials. He concludes that "violent denunciations of the one policy or the other as per se, and of necessity, foolish and mischievous, without any regard to the manifold diversities of period, people, and country, are out of place in the sober reasonings of science. Even to say that free trade should be the rule, protection the exception, or conversely, is more likely to mislead than elucidate; and such a vague and general formula does not help us in the complicated discussion needed for each peculiar and actual case.

201. Prof. Perry's Free Trade Methods-Does, or Does Not Free Trade Employ Foreign Labor?-Prof. Arthur L. Perry's "Elements of Political Economy " has had a success like that of debased coins, due as much to its alloy as to its value. It discards the inductive or statistical method, as does also Mr. Mill, and says:

"It may be considered as a point already well settled by experience that no man's sagacity is sufficient to guide himself or others to any sound conclusions on this field who takes his stand at the outset, amid the whirl of interlocking phenomena, and then endeavors to work himself out through the entangling meshes which surround him at every step. Happily, there is no need of any such procedure. Happily, man is man, motive is motive, and exchange is exchange, and the apparent chaos of commerce can be resolved through these alone into harmony and order."

This is as if Descartes, in defending the assumption that planetary motion is due to a celestial ether moving in vortices, against Newton's theory of gravity, should charge Newton with taking his stand at the outset amid the whirl of interlocking phenomena, and should suggest that a much simpler solution of the problem lies in the fact that the earth is the earth, the sun is the sun, ether is ether, motion is motion, and vortices are vortices. The simplicity of such lines of proof is only apparent to minds that not only need no proof, but would not comprehend it if it were offered.

In arguing that the importation of foreign goods, as compared with their production in this country, involves no loss to the national industry, Prof. Perry commits the same palpable oversight which we have pointed out in Jevons, and this oversight

takes the place, with him, of both foresight and insight. He says (eleventh edition, pp. 396-7):

"Foreign articles are certainly wrought by foreign labor; do we then by buying them employ foreign labor to the prejudice of our own laborers? We are obliged to pay for every thing we buy-are we not? In what do we pay? Clearly, in the products of our own labor. We employ our own laborers to produce the articles we exchange for foreign articles. We pay for our imports by our exports. Our exports are created by home labor, and the only possible way for us to obtain the results of foreign toil is to offer in exchange the results of domestic toil. A commercial nation therefore not only does not, but it cannot, employ foreign labor. The more it buys of foreigners, the more home labor it must employ to create the articles with which it pays for what it buys, etc., etc."

To employ American labor in creating the price, commodity, crop, or quid pro quo which we exchange for a product, employs only half as much American labor, as to employ American labor, in creating both, that with which we pay, and that which we pay it for. If, for instance, we raise corn to buy iron, he claims that we encourage American labor equally whether we buy foreign or American iron, because in either case we pay for it with the products of American labor. But, in the purchase of foreign iron, only the price we pay represents American labor, while, in the purchase of American iron, both the price we pay, and the thing we pay it for, represent and are the fruit of, American labor. Supposing that, in both cases, we get the worth of our corn in iron, in the case of the imported iron we give employment only to the American labor that produces the corn, while in the case of the American iron, we give employment to the same amount of American labor in producing the corn, and to an equal amount in addition, in producing the iron.

This point having been stated very plainly by Adam Smith, both Jevons and Perry were bound to apprehend it in its true significance as an alternative between an importing policy, which it is admitted employs one capital and set of laborers, and a policy of home production, which employs two. The fact that neither Jevons nor Perry truly states the point, before assuming to controvert it, leaves the impression on the mind that they see that to state it is to make it incontrovertible on its face. Again Prof. Perry says on page 371 (eleventh edition) that the differences which give rise to international trade are a “diversity of original gifts, in climate, soil, natural productions, position, and opportunity," and an acquired "diversity of tastes, aptitudes, habits, strength, intelligence, and skill." He then says:

"It is on these diversities, original, traditional, and acquired, that international commerce depends; it never would have come into existence without them, and it would cease instantly and completely without them."

THE "NATURAL CONDITIONS" PLEA.

573

So far as international commerce arises out of diversity of natural conditions, as between a temperate climate and a tropical, or between a climate and soil like that of China, adapted to tea, or like Arabia and Brazil to coffee, protectionists say : "Off with all duties"-let these articles be free. Nor could any duty which could be placed on such articles be a protective duty, since there would be no domestic product to receive the protection. Hence, protectionists, in 1868 to 1870, were foremost in removing all duties from tea and coffee, and their principle requires them to strive to keep all duties off from tropical products, unless our territory extends far enough southward, as in the cases of sugar, oranges, and bananas, to admit of a portion of our people producing them. To these duties which protect nothing the free traders of the United States adhere, however, tenaciously, on the ground that they are, of all duties, the most purely for revenue only. Hence, Prof. Perry is inaccurate in claiming, as a free tråde doctrine, a reason for taking off duties, which only applies to cases wherein the free traders as a party, and Prof. Perry with the rest, want the duties to be high, while only the protectionists take them off altogether. The duties, which protectionists desire to maintain, and free traders to abolish, are those which rest on products coming from England, France, Germany, and Canada, between which countries and ourselves there is no natural diver. sity but only substantial identity of climate, soil, and other con ditions, and which produce, not an unlike crop, or product, to offer in exchange for ours, but the same crop or product, to offer in competition with ours, to our own consumers.

It is not true that a nation will cease instantly and completely to make iron, because another nation has richer mines, or more coal and lime, or could make the iron with less effort measured in days' work; on the contrary, such first nation may never find it possible to begin to make iron, if every ton it turns out, though by a third less labor, is converted into a loss of money, by being met with a ton of foreign iron, which will undersell it by a third in money.

By the report of Mr. Hewitt, American Commissioner to the Paris Exposition of 1867, on iron, it appears that as much iron could then be produced in Pennsylvania by one day's work as could be made in England by two, and in France by two days and a half. This settles conclusively the fact that all natural and acquired diversities favoring the production of iron were even then two to one in our favor, for we could produce iron by one

half the effort that the English could, and by two-fifths of that expended by the French. But whether from such a division of the price of the iron, between the British iron-master and his workmen, that the latter got less than half the proportion paid to the American workmen, or other cause, the English iron-master did produce iron at twice the actual cost, in effort, and still sold it at a less money cost than the American producer.

As Mr. Devas truly points out, if the "diversity" on which a competitor depends for his ability to undersell us, is a disinherited and pauperized proletariat of starved workmen, undergoing eviction from their homes and exile from their country, is it not wiser in the interests of the whole human race to attract these pauperized workmen to the United States, where by one-half the expenditure of effort required in England, he can make as much iron as there, and get for himself a larger proportion of the cost of production as wages?

202. Why Canadians may Not have Free Trade with Vermont.-Prof. Perry asks (p. 396, eleventh edition) the following question :

"The south end of Vermont trades freely and advantageously with its neighbors across the line in Massachusetts; is there any good reason why the north end of Vermont should not trade just as freely and advantageously with its neighbors across the line in Canada ?"

If Prof. Perry were asked why he did not teach political econ omy in Timbuctoo, where the mental darkness is very great, instead of in Massachusetts, where there is relatively almost a surplus of education, it might be difficult to compress, into one sentence, all the answers to so revolutionary an inquiry. But a first and sufficient answer might be, that the regents of the universities of Timbuctoo had not invited him; secondly, that Timbuctoo had no universities or regents; and, thirdly, that, as Timbuctoo does not protect its industries in any way, it had reached that acme of political wisdom, in which to export a Prof. Perry to it would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. So, in answer to Prof. Perry's question, it may be said: first, that the American tariff is designed to give American producers a first chance at American markets, and the Canadians, never having intentionally contributed toward the cost of maintaining American institutions, are not entitled to share in that first chance; secondly, that, as the Canadians and Vermonters both produce the same crops, they could have no motive to sell to each other; and hence, that the goods which would in fact cross the line would be En

HOME UNITIES VS. FOREIGN FREEDOMS.

575

glish manufactures from Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield, seeking to undermine the American manufacturers in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

The people of the New England States have certain financial interests in common in which Canadians do not participate, and, on the other hand, Canadians have interests in common as members of one national family. While these interests relate primarily to government, education, mutual national co-operation and defence in war, yet they relate in many ways to trade, money, especially paper money, banks, bankruptcies, transportation, and other matters affecting business.

When a man has married a wife, and becomes the head of a family of his own, the closer relationship which thus binds him to his wife and daughters precludes the dignity and propriety of his receiving services from, and rendering attentions to, the wives and daughters of his neighbors, merely on the ground that, in a single transaction, it might be shown to be cheaper. The business life of two nations, like the social life of two families, is not a mere isolated transaction, but is a continuous national career, the dignity and utility of which requires that its several parts shall surrender some hypothetical freedom for the perfecting of the higher unities which ensue. The Vermonters and Canadians produce substantially the same products, viz. : lumber, grains, meats, potatoes, wool, hay, butter, and cheese. If Canadians were permitted, therefore, to trade free with Vermonters, it would not be with them that they would trade, but they would compete with them in selling the above products to the manufacturing, artisan, and exchanging populations, of New England and New York. As competitors, seeking to undersell the Vermonters, let us see whether the international boundary line does not mark a very great difference of conditions. The present value of the New England markets, to a farmer, grows largely out of the vigor of their manufactures, and the great number of persons dwelling in New England who are not engaged in farming. To secure these large manufactures, the Union had to be preserved from dissolution at a cost of many millions of dollars, and many antecedent losses and failures in business had to be undergone, in none of which Canada had any part. These manufactures are in part the product of patent laws, and in part of protective tariff laws, and in part of state aid, and in part of corporate and individual enterprise, and in part of state legislation, state education, and other state and national expenses, in which Canada has no share. From