Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844

Nature has established this great and all-important distinction between the effects of wealth and national age on the productions of agriculture and of manufactures. The reason is this:— If capital, machinery, and knowledge, conferred the same immediate and decisive advantage on agricultural that they do on manufacturing industry, old and densely-peopled states would possess an undue superiority over the ruder and more thinly-inhabited ones; the multiplication of the human race would become excessive in the seats in which it had first taken root, and the desert parts of the world would never, but under the pressure of absolute necessity, be explored. The first command of God to man, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it," would be frustrated. The apprehensions of the Malthusians as to an excessive increase of mankind, with its attendant dangers, would be realized in particular places, while nineteen-twentieths of the earth lay neglected in a state of nature. The desert would be left alone in its glory. The world would be covered with huge and densely-peopled excrescences—with Babylons, Romes, and Londons—in which wealth, power, and corruption were securely and permanently intrenched, and from which the human race would ne'er diverge but under the pressure of absolute impossibility to wrench a subsistence from their over-peopled vicinities.

These dangers, threatening alike to the moral character and material welfare of nations, are completely prevented by the simple law, the operations of which we every day see around us—viz. that wealth, civilization, and knowledge, add rapidly and indefinitely to the powers of manufacturing and commercial, but comparatively slowly to those of agricultural industry. This simple circumstance effectually provides for the dispersion of the human race, and the check of an undue growth in particular communities. The old state can always undersell the young one in manufactures, but it is everlastingly undersold by them in agriculture. Thus the equalization of industry is introduced, the dispersion of the human race secured, and a limit put to the perilous multiplication of its members in particular communities. The old state can never rival the young ones around it in raising subsistence; the young ones can never rival the old one in manufactured articles. Either a free trade takes place between them, or restrictions are established. If the commercial intercourse between them is unrestricted, agriculture is destroyed, and with it national strength is undermined in the old state, and manufactures are nipped in the bud in the young ones. If restrictions prevail, and a war of tariffs is introduced, the agriculture of the old state, and with it its national strength, is preserved, but its export of manufactures to the adjoining states is checked, and they establish growing fabrics for themselves. Whichever effect takes place, the object of nature in the equalization of industry, the limitation of aged communities, and the dispersion of mankind, is gained, in the first, by the ruin of the old empire from the decay of its agricultural resources; in the second, by the check given to its manufacturing prowess, and the transference of mercantile industry to its younger rivals.

Generally the interests and necessities of the young states introduce a prohibitory system to exclude the manufactures of the old one; and it is this necessity which England is now experiencing, and vainly endeavours to obviate, by introducing a system of free trade. But in one memorable instance, and one only, the preponderance of a particular power rendered this impossible, and illustrated on a great scale, and over the whole civilized world, for a course of centuries, the effects of a perfect freedom of trade. The Roman empire, spreading as it did round the shores of the Mediterranean, afforded the utmost facilities for a great internal traffic; while the equal policy of the emperors, and indeed the necessity of their situation, introduced a perfect freedom in the interchange of commodities between every part of their vast dominions. And what was the result? Why, that the agriculture of Italy was destroyed—that 300,000 acres in the champaign of Naples alone reverted to a state of nature, and were tenanted only by wild-boars and buffaloes, before a single barbarian had crossed the Alps—that the Grecian cities were entirely maintained by grain from the plains of Podolia—and the mistress of the world, according to the plaintive expression of the Roman annalist, depended for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile.²⁰ Not the corruption of manners, not the tyranny of the Caesars, occasioned the ruin of the empire, for they affected only a limited class of the people; but the practical working of free trade, joined to domestic slavery, which destroyed the agricultural population of the heart of the empire, and left only effeminate urban multitudes to contend with the hardy barbarians of the north.

The advocates of free trade are not insensible to the superior advantages of the rising over the old state in agriculture, and of the latter over the former in manufactures. On the contrary, it is a secret but clear sense of the reality of this distinction, which causes them so strenuously to contend for the removal of all restrictions. They hope, by so doing, to effect a great extension of their sales in foreign countries, without, as they pretend, creating any diminution in their own. But the views which have now been given show that this is a vain conceit, and demonstrate how it has happened, that the more strenuously England contends for the principles of free trade, and the more energetically that she carries them into practice, the more decided is the resistance which she meets on foreign states in the attempt, and the more rigorously do they act on the principles of protection. It is because they are striving to become manufacturing and commercial communities that they do this—it is a clear sense of the ruin which awaits them, if deluged with British goods, which makes them so strenuous in their system of exclusion. The more that we open our trade, the more will they close theirs. They think, and not without reason, that we advocate unrestricted commercial intercourse only because it would be profitable to us, and deprecate our old system of exclusion only because it has now been turned against ourselves. "Now, then," say they, "is the time, when England is suffering under the system of exclusion, which we have at length had sense enough to borrow from her, to draw closer the bonds of that system, and complete the glorious work of our own elevation on her ruins. Our policy is clearly chalked out by hers; we have only to do what she deprecates, and we are sure to be right." It is evident that these views will be permanently entertained by them, because they are founded on the strongest of all instincts that of self-preservation. When we cease to be a great manufacturing nation, when we are no longer formidable rivals, they will open their harbours; but not till then. In striving to introduce a system of free trade, therefore, we gratuitously inflict a severe wound on our domestic industry, without any chance even of a compensation in that which is destined for the foreign markets. We let in their goods into our harbours, but we do not obtain admission, nor will we ever obtain admission, for ours into theirs. The reciprocity is, and ever must be, all on one side.

It is by mistaking the dominant influence among the continental states, that so large a portion of the community are deceived on this subject. They say, if we take their grain and cattle, they will take our cotton goods; that their system of exclusion is entirely a consequence of, and retaliation for, ours. Can they produce a single instance in which our concessions in favour of their rude produce have led to a corresponding return in favour of ours? How can it be so, when, in all old states, the monied is the prevailing interest which sways the determinations of government? The landholders, separated from each other, without capital, almost all burdened with debt, are no match in the domestic struggle for the manufacturing and commercial interests. Their superiority is founded on a very clear footing—the same which has rendered the British House of Commons omnipotent. They hold the purse. It is their loans which support the credit of Government; it is by the customs which their imports pay that the public revenue is to be chiefly raised. The more popular that governments become, the more strongly will their influences appear in the war of tariffs. If pure democracies were established in all the neighbouring states, we would be met in then all by a duty of sixty per cent. Witness the American tariff of 1842, and the progressive increases of duties against us since the popular revolutions we have fostered and encouraged in France, Belgium, and Portugal.

Is, then, a free and unrestrained system of commercial intercourse impossible between nations, and must it ever end in a war of tariffs and the pacific infliction of mutual injury? We consider it is impossible between two nations, both manufacturing, or aspiring to be so, and in the same, or nearly the same, age and social circumstances. It is mere folly to attempt it; because interests which must clash, are continually arising on both parts, and reciprocity, if attempted, is on one side only. With such nations, the only wisdom is, to conclude treaties, not of reciprocity, but of commerce; that is, treaties in which, in consideration of certain branches of our manufactures being admitted on favourable terms, we agree to admit certain articles of their produce on equally advantageous conditions. Thus, a treaty, by which we agreed to admit, for a moderate duty, the wines of France, which we can never rival, in return for their admitting our iron and cotton goods on similar terns, would be a measure of equal benefit to both countries. It would be as wise a measure as Mr Huskisson's reduction of the duties on French silks, gloves, and clocks, was a gratuitous and unwarranted injury to staple branches of our own industry. The only countries to which the reciprocity system is really applicable, are distant states in an early state of civilization, whose natural products are essentially different from our own, and whose stage of advancement is not such as to have made them enter on the career of manufacture, of jealousy, and of tariffs. Colonies unite all these advantages; and it is in them that the real sources of our strength, and the only secure markets for our produce, are to be found; but that subject, so vast, so interesting, so vital to our individual and national advancement, must be reserved for a future occasion.