Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844

"The pure delight, the awful change,
Chief miracle in wonder's range,
That binds the twain in one;
While fear, foes, friends, and angry Fate,
And all that wreck our mortal state
Shall pass, like motes i' the sun.

"In his fine frame the throstle feels
The music that his note reveals;
And spite of shafts and nets,
How better is the dying bird
Than some dumb stone that ne'er was heard,
That arrow never threats?

"Disdaining man, the mountains rise;
Is love less kindred with the skies,
Or less their Maker's will?
The strains, without a human cause,
Flow on, unheeding lies and laws—
Will hearts for words be still?

"What cliffs oppose, what oceans roll,
What frowns o'ershade the weeping soul,
Alas! were long to tell.
But something is there more than these,
Than frowns and coldness, rocks and seas:
Until its hour—farewell!"

So sang the vassal bard by night,
Beneath his high-born lady's light
That from her turret shone.
Next morning in the forest glade
His corpse was found. Her brother's blade
Had cut his bosom's bone.

What reap'd Lord Wilfrid by the stroke?
Before another morning broke,
She, too, was with the blest:
And 'twas her last and only prayer,
That her sweet limbs might slumber where
The minstrel had his rest.

    J. S.

FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION

THE CORN LAWS

It is remarkable that, while we hear so much of the advantages of free trade, the reciprocity of them is always in prospect only. By throwing open our harbours to foreign nations, indeed, we give them an immediate and obvious advantage over ourselves; but as to any corresponding advantages we are to gain in our intercourse with them, we are still waiting, in patient expectation of the anticipated benefit. Our patience is truly exemplary; it might furnish a model to Job himself. We resent nothing. No sooner do we receive a blow on one cheek, than we turn up the other to some new smiter. No sooner are we excluded, in return for our concessions, from the harbours of one state, than we begin making concessions to another. We are constantly in expectation of seeing the stream of human envy and jealousy run out:—

"Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis: at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum."

We are imitating the man who made the experiment of constantly reducing the food on which his horse is to live. Let us take care that, just as he is learning to live on nothing, we do not find him dead in his stall.

This, however, is no joking matter. The total failure of the free trade system to procure any, even the smallest return, coupled with the very serious injury it has inflicted on many of the staple branches of our industry, has now been completely demonstrated by experience, and is matter of universal notoriety. If any proof on the subject were required, it would be furnished by Porter's Parliamentary Tables, to which we earnestly request the attention of our readers. The first exhibits the effect of the reciprocity system, introduced by Mr Huskisson in Feb. 1823, in destroying our shipping with the Baltic powers, and quadrupling theirs with us. The second shows the trifling amount of our exports to these countries during the five last years, and thereby demonstrates the entire failure of the attempt to, extend our traffic with them by this gratuitous destruction of our shipping. The third shows the progress of our whole exports to Europe during the six years from 1814 to 1820, before the free trade began, and from 1833 to 1839, after it had been fifteen years in operation, and proves that it had declined in the latter period as compared with the former, despite all our gratuitous sacrifices by free trade to augment our commerce.[12 - See No. CCCXL, Blackwood's Magazine, p. 261.]

The free traders fully admit, and deeply deplore, as we have shown on a former occasion, these unfavourable results; but they say that it is to be hoped they will not continue: that foreign nations must, in the end, come to see that they are as much interested as we are in enlightened system of free trade; and that, meantime, it is for our interest to continue the system; or even though it totally fails in producing any augmentation in our exports, it is obviously for our advantage to continue it, as it brings in the immediate benefit of purchasing articles imported at a cheaper rate. Supposing, say they, we obtain no corresponding advantage from other states, there is an immense benefit accrues to ourselves from admitting foreign goods at a nominal duty, from the low price at which they may be purchased by the British consumer. To that point we shall advert in the sequel; in the mean time, it may be considered as demonstrated, that the free trade system has entirely failed in procuring for us the slightest extension of our foreign exports, or abating in the slightest degree the jealousy of foreign nations at our maritime and manufacturing superiority. Nor is there any difficulty in discovering to what this failure has been owing. It arises from laws inherent in the nature of things, and which will remain unabated as long as we continue a great and prosperous nation.

It is related of the Lacedemonians, that while all the other citizens of Greece were careful to surround their towns with walls, they alone left a part open on all sides. Thus, superiority in the field rendered them indifferent to the adventitious protection of ramparts. It is for a similar reason that England is now willing to throw down the barriers of tariffs, and the impediments of custom-houses; and that all other nations are fain to raise them up. It is a secret sense of superiority on the one side, and of inferiority on the other, which is the cause of the difference. We advocate freedom of trade, because we are conscious that, in a fair unrestricted competition, we should succeed in beating them out of their own market. They resist it, and loudly clamour for protection, because they are aware that such a result would speedily take place, and that the superiority of the old commercial state is such, that on an open trial of strength, it must at once prove fatal to its younger rivals. As this effect is thus the result of permanent causes affecting both sides, it may fairly be presumed that it will be lasting; and that the more anxiously the old manufacturing state advocates or acts upon freedom of commercial intercourse, the more strenuously will the younger and rising ones advocate protection. Reciprocity, therefore, is out of the question between them: for it never could exist without the destruction of the manufactures of the younger state; and if that state has begun to enter on the path of manufacturing industry, it never will be permitted by its government.

But this is not all. If free trade must of necessity prove fatal to the manufactures of the younger state, it as certainly leads to the destruction of the agriculture of the older; and it is this double effect this RECIPROCITY OF EVIL, which renders it so disastrous and impracticable an experiment for both the older and the younger community. The reason of this has not hitherto been generally attended to; but when once it is stated, its force becomes obvious, and it furnishes the true answer on principle to the delusive doctrines of free trade.

Nature has established, and, as it will immediately be shown, for very wise and important purposes, a permanent and indelible distinction between the effect of civilization and opulence on the production of food, and on the preparation of manufactures. In the latter, the discoveries of science, the exertions of skill, the application of capital, the introduction of machinery, are all-powerful, and give the older and more advanced state an immediate and decisive advantage over the younger and the ruder. In the former, the very reverse takes place: the additions made to productive power are comparatively inconsiderable, even by the most important discoveries; and as this capital and industry have in the end a powerful effect, and always enable the power of raising food for the human race to keep far a-head of the wants of mankind; yet this effect takes place very slowly, and the annual addition that can be made to the produce of the earth by such means is by no means considerable. The introduction of thorough draining will probably increase the productive power of the soil in Great Britain a third: scientific discovery may perhaps add another third; but at least ten years must elapse in the most favourable view before these effects generally take place—ere the judicious and well-directed labours of our husbandmen have formed rivulets for the superfluous wet of our fields, or overspread the soil with the now wasted animal remains of our cities. But our manufactures can in a few years quadruple their produce. So vast is the power which the steam-engine has made to the powers of production in commercial industry, that it is susceptible to almost indefinite and immediate extension; and the great difficulty always felt is, not to get hands to keep pace with the demand of the consumers, but to get a demand to keep pace with the hands employed in the production. Manchester and Glasgow could, in a few years, furnish muslin and cotton goods for the whole world.

Nor is the difference less important and conspicuous in the price at which manufacturing and agricultural produce can be raised in the old and the young state. This is the decisive circumstance which renders reciprocity between them impossible. The rich old state is as superior to the young one in the production of manufactures, as the poor young state is to the rich old one in that of subsistence. The steam-engine, capital, and machinery, have so enormously increased the power of manufacturing production, that they have rendered the old commercial state omnipotent in the foreign market in the supply of its articles. Nothing but fiscal regulations and heavy duties can protect the young state from ruin in those branches of industry. Heavy taxes, high wages, costly rents, dear rude produce, all are at once compensated, and more than compensated, by the gigantic powers of the steam-engine. Cotton goods are raised now in Great Britain at a fifth of the price which they were during the war. A gown, which formerly was cheap at £2, 10s., is now sold for ten shillings. Silks, muslins, and all other articles of female apparel, have been reduced in price in the same proportion. Colossal fortunes have been made by the master manufacturers, unbounded wealth diffused through the operative workmen in Lancashire and Lanarkshire, even at these extremely reduced prices. This is the real reason of the universal effort made by all nations which have the least pretensions to commercial industry, of late years to exclude, by fixed duties, our staple manufactures; of which the President of the Board of Trade so feelingly complains, and which the advocates of free trade consider as so inexplicable. A very clear principle has led to it, and will lead to it. It is the instinct of SELF-PRESERVATION.

But there is no steam-engine in agriculture. The old state has no superiority over the young one in the price of producing food; on the contrary, it is decidedly its inferior. There, as in love, the apprentice is the master. The proof of this is decisive. Poland can raise wheat with ease at fifteen or twenty shillings a quarter, while England requires fifty. The serf of the Ukraine would make a fortune on the price at which the farmer of Kent or East Lothian would be rendered bankrupt. The Polish cultivators have no objection whatever to a free competition with the British; but the British anticipate, and with reason, total destruction from the free admission of Polish grain. These facts are so notorious, that they require no illustration; but nevertheless the conclusion to which they point is of the highest importance, and bears, with overwhelming force, on the theory of free trade as between an old and a young community. They demonstrate that that theory is not only practically pernicious, but on principle erroneous. It involves an oblivion of the fundamental law of nature as to the difference between the effect of wealth and civilization on the production of food and the raising of manufactures. It proceeds on insensibility to the difference in the age and advancement of nations, and the impossibility of a reciprocity being established between them without the ruin of an important branch of industry in each. It supposes nations to be of the same genus and age, like the trees in the larch plantation, not of all varieties and ages, as in the natural forest. If established in complete operation, it would only lead to the ruin of the manufactures of the younger state, and of the agriculture of the old one. The only reciprocity which it can ever introduce between such states is the reciprocity of evil.

Illustrations from everyday life occur on all sides to elucidate the utter absurdity, and, in fact, total impracticapability of the system of free trade, as applied to nations who are, or are becoming, rivals of each other in manufacturing industry. Those who have the advantage, will always advocate free competition; those who are labouring under impediments, will always exclaim against them. In some cases the young have the advantage, in others the old; but in all the free system is applauded by those in the sunshine, and execrated by those in the shade. The fair debutante of eighteen, basking in the bright light of youth, beauty, birth, and connections, has no sort of objection to the freedom of choice in the ball-room. If the mature spinster of forty would divulge her real opinion, what would it be on the same scene of competition? Experience proves that she is glad to retire, in the general case, from the unequal struggle, and finds the system of established precedence and fixed rank at dinner parties, much more rational. The leaders on the North Circuit—Sir James Scarlett or Lord Brongham—have no objections to the free choice, by solicitors and attorneys, for professional talent; but their younger brethren of the gown are fain to take shelter from such formidable rivals in the exclusive employment of the Crown, the East India Company, the Bank of England, or some of the numerous chartered companies in the country. England is the old lawyer on the Cirucuit in manufactures—but Poland is the young beauty of the ball-room in agriculture. We should like to see what sort of reciprocity could be established between them. Possibly the young belle may exchange her beauty for the old lawyer's guineas, but it will prove a bad reciprocity for both.

It is usual for both philosophers and practical men to ascribe the superior cheapness with which subsistence can be raised in the young state to the old one, to the weight of taxes and of debt, public and private, with which the latter is burdened, from which the former is, in general, relieved. But, without disputing that these circumstances enter with considerable weight into the general result, it may safely be affirmed that the main cause of it is to be found in two laws of nature, of universal and permanent application. These are the low value of money in the rich state, in consequence of its plenty, compared with its high value in the poor one, in consequence of its poverty, and the experienced inapplicability of machinery or the division of labour to agricultural operations.

Labour is cheap in the poor state, such as Poland, Prussia, and the Ukraine, becuase guineas are few.—"It is not," as Johnson said of the Highlands, "that eggs are many, but that pence are few." Commercial transactions being scanty, and the want of a circulating medium inconsiderable, it exists to a very limited extent in the country. People do not need a large circulating medium, therefore they do not buy it; they are poor, therefore they cannot. In the opulent and highly advanced community, on the other hand, the reverse of all this takes place. Transactions are so frequent, the necessities of commerce so extensive, that a large circulating medium is soon felt to be indispensable. In addition to a considerable amount of specie, the aid of bank-notes, public and private, of Government securities and exchequer bills, and of private bills to an immense ammount, bcomes necessary. McCulloch calculates the circulating medium of Great Britain, including paper and gold, at L.72,000,000. The bills in circulation are probably in amount nearly as much more. A hundred and forty, or a hundred and fifty millions, between specie, bank-notes, exchequer bills, Government securities, on which advances are made, and private bills, constitute the ordinary circulating medium of twenty-seven millions in the British empire. The total circulation of Russia, with sixty millions of inhabitants, is not forty millions sterling. The effect of this difference is prodigions. It is no wonder, whten it is taken into account, that wages are 5-1/2d. or 6d. a-day in Poland or the Ukraine, and 2s. or 2s. 6d. a-day in England.

The clearest proof that this is the great cause of the superior cost of raising subsistence in the old than the young state, is afforded by the different value which money bears in different parts of the same community. Ask any housekeeper what is the difference between the expense of living in London, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, and he will answer, that L.1500 a-year in Edingburgh, or L.750 in Aberdeen. Yet these different places are all situated in the same community, and their inhabitants pay the same public taxes, and very nearly the same of local ones. It is the vast results arising from the concentration of wealth and expediture in one place, compared with its abstraction from others, which occasions the difference. But if this effect is conspicuous, and matter of daily observation, in different parts of the same compact and moderately sized country, how much more must it obtain in regard to different countries, situated in different latitudes and politcal circumstances, and in different stages of wealth, civilization, and commercial opulence? Between England for example, and Poland or the Ukraine? The difference is there important and durable. Wheat can be raised with as good a profit to the cultivator for sixteen shillings per quarter in Poland, as for forty-eight shillings in England or Scotland.

This superior weight of wages, rent and all the elements of cost, in the old, when compared with the young community, affects the manufacturer as well as the farmer; and in some branches of manufactures it does so with an overwhelming effect. But, generally speaking, the advantages of capital, machinery, and the division of labour, render the old state altogether predominant over the young one in these particulars. It would seem to be a fixed law of nature, that the progress of society adds almost nothing to the application of machinery to agriculture, but indefinitely to its importance in manufactures. Observe an old man digging his garden with a spade—that is the most productive species of cultivation; it is the last stage of agricultural progress to return to it. No steam engines or steam ploughs will ever rival it. But what is the old weaver toiling with his hands, to the large steam-power mill, turning at once ten thousand spindles? As dust in the balance. Man, by a beneficent law of his Maker, is permanently secured in his first and best pursuit. It is in those which demoralize and degrade, that machinery progressively encroaches on the labour of his hands. England can undersell India in muslins and printed goods, manufactured in Lancashire or Lanarkshire, out of cotton which grew on the banks of the Ganges; for England though younger in years compared to India, is old in civilization, wealth, and power. We should like to see what profit would be made by exporting wheat from England, raised on land paying thirty shillings an acre of rent, by labourers paid at two shillings a-day, to Hindostan, where rice is raised twice a-year, on land paying five shillings an acre rent, by labourers receiving twopence a-day each.

It is the constant operation of this law of nature which ensures the equalization of empires, the happiness of society, and the dispersion of mankind. To be convinced of this, we have only to reflect on the results which would ensue if this were not the case; if no unvarying law gave man in remote situations an advantage in raising subsistence over what they enjoy in the centres of opulence; and agriculture, in the aged and wealthy community, was able to acquire the same decisive superiority over distant and comparatively poor ones, which we see daily examplified in the production of manufactures. Suppose, for example, that in consequence of the application of the steam-engine, capital, and machinery to the raising of subsistence, Great Britian could undersell the cultivatiors of Poland and the Ukraine as effectually as she does their manufacturers in the production of cotton goods; that she could sell in the Polish market wheat at five shillings a quarter, when they require fifteen shillings to remunerate the cost of production. Would not the result be, that commerce between them would be entirely destroyed; that subsistence would be exclusively raised in the old opulent community; that mankind would congregate in fearful multitudes round the great commercial emporium of the world; and that the industry and progress of the more distant nations would be irrevocably blighted? Whereas, by the operation of the present law of nature, that the rich state can always undersell the poor one in maufactures, and the poor one always undersell the rich one in subsistence, those dangers are removed, a check is provided to the undue multiplication of the species in particular situations, and the dispersion of mankind over the globe—a vital object in the system of nature—is secured, from the very necessities and difficulties in which, in the progress of society, the old and wealthy community becomes involved.

These considerations point out an important limitation to which, on principle, the doctrines of free trade must be subjected. Perfectly just in reference to a single community, or a compact empire of reasonable extent, they wholly fail when applied to separate nations in different degrees of civilization, or even to different provinces of the same empire, when it is of such an extent as to bring such different nations, in various degrees of progress, under one common dominion. They were suggested, in the first instance, to philosophers, by the absurd restrictions on the commerce of grain which existed in France under the old monarchy, and which Turgot and the Economists laboured so assiduously to abolish. There can be no doubt that they were perfectly right in doing so; for France is a compact, homogeneous country, in which the cost of producing subsistence is not materially different in one part from another, and the interests of the whole community are closely identified. The same holds with the interchange of grain between the different provinces of Spain, or for the various parts of the British islands. But the case is widely different with an empire so extensive as, like the British in modern or the Roman in ancient times, to embrace separate kingdoms, in wholly different circumstances of climate, progress, and social condition. Free trade, in such circumstances, must lead to a destruction of important interests, and a total subversion of the balance of society in both the kingdoms subjected to it. To be conviced of this, we have only to look at the present condition of the British, or the past fate of the Roman empire.

It is the boast of our manufacturers—and such a marvel may well afford a subject for exultation—that with cotton which grew on the banks of the Ganges, they can, by the aid of British capital, machinery, and enterprise, undersell, in the production of muslin and cotton goods, the native Indian manufacturers, who work up their fabrics in the close vicinity of the original cotton-fields. The constant and increasing export of Britsh goods to India, two-thirds of which are cotton, demonstrates that this superiority really exists; and that the muslin manufacturers in Hindostan, who work for 3d. a-day on their own cotton, cannot stand the competition of the British operatives, who receive 3s. 6d. a-day, aided as they are by the almost miraculous powers of the steam-engine. Free trade, therefore, is ruinous to the manufacturing interests of India; and accordingly the Parliamentary proceedings are filled with evidence of the extreme misery which has been brought on the native manufacturers of Hindostan by that free importation of British goods, in which our political economists so much and so fully exult.

The great distance of India from the British islands, the vast expense of transporting bulky articles eight thousand miles accross the ocean, have prevented the counterpart of this effect taking place; and the British farmers feeling the depressing influence of the Indian plough, in like manner as the Indian manufacturers have the ruinous competition of the British steam-engine. But it is clear that, if India had been nearer, the former effect would have taken place as well as the latter. If the shores of Hindostan were within a few days sail of London and Liverpool, and the Indian cultivators, labouring at 2d. or 3d. a-day, had been brought into direct competition with the British farmers, employing labourers who received two or three shillings, can there be a doubt that the British farmers would have been totally destroyed in the struggle? The English farmers would have been prostrated by the same cause which has ruined the Indian muslin manufacturers. Cheap grain, the fruit of free trade, would have demolished British agriculture as completely as cheap cotton goods, the fruits of unlimited importation, has ruined Indian manufacturing industry.

Is, then, commercial intercourse impossible, on terms of mutual benefit, between states in widely different circumstatnces of commercial or agricultural advancement; and is the only reciprocity which can exist between them and reciprocity of evil? It is by no means necessary to rest in so unsatisfatory a conclusion. A most advantageous commercial intercourse to both parties may be carried on, but it must not be on the footing of free trade. The foundation of such an intercourse should be, that each should take, on the most favourable terms, the articles which it wants and does not produce, and impose restrictions on those which it wants and does produce. On this priciple, trade would be conducted so as to benefit both countries, and injure neither. Thus England may take from India to the utmost extent, and with perfect safety, sugar, indigo, cotton, tea, spices, cinnamon, and the more costly species of shawls; while India might take from England some species of cotton manufacture in which they have no fabrics of their own, cutlery, hardware, and all of the various luxuries of European manufacture. But a paternal and just government, equally alive to the interests of all its provinces, how far removed soever from the seat of power, would impose restrictions to prevent India being deluged with British cottons, to the ruin of its native manufactures, and to prevent Britian—if the distance did not operate, which it certainly would, as a sufficient protection—from being flooded with Indian grain. The varieties of climate, productions, and wants, in different countries, are such, that commerce, regulated on these principles, might be carried to the greatest extent consistent with the paramount duty of providing in each state for the preservation of its staple articles of industry.

The Roman empire in ancient times afforded the clearest demonstration of the truth of these principles; and the fate of their vast dominion shows, in the most decisive manner, what is the inevitable consequence to which the free trade principles, now so strongly contended for by a party in this country, must lead. Alison is the first modern author with whom we are acquainted, who has traced the decline of the Roman empire in great part to this source. In the tenth volume of his "History of Europe," p. 752, we find the following passage:—

"No nation can pretend to independence which rests for any sensible protion of its subsistence in ordinary seasons on foreign, who may become hostile, nations. And if we would see a memorable example of the manner in which the greatest and most powerful nation may, in the course of ages, come to be paralysed by this cause, we have only to cast our eyes on imperial Rome, when the vast extent of the empire had practically established a free trade in grain with the whole civilized world; and the result was, that cultivation disappeared from the Italian plains, that the race of Roman agriculturists, the strength of the empire, became extinct, that the fields were laboured only by slaves and cattle. The legions could no longer be recruited but from foreign bands, vast tracts of pasturage overspread even the fields of Lombardy and the Compagna of Naples, and it was the plaintive confession of the Roman annalist, that the mistress of the world had come to depend for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile."

This observation has excited, as well it might, the vehement indignation of the free trade journals. The example of the greates and most powerful nation that ever existed being weakened, and at length ruined by a free trade in corn, afforded too cogent an argument, and was too striking a warning, not to excite the wrath of those who would precipitate Great Britain into a similar course of policy. They have attacked the author, accordingly, with unwonted asperity; and, while they admint the ruin of Italian agriculture in the later stages of the Roman empire, endeavour to ascribe it to the gratuitous distribution of grain to the Roman populace, not the effect of a free importation of grain from its Egyptian and African provinces. The vast importance of the subject has induced us to look into the original authorities to whom Alison refers in support of his observation, and from among them we select three—Tacitus, Gibbon, and Michelet. Tacitus says,

"At Hercule olim ex Itaila legionibus longinquas in provincias commeatus portabantur, nec nunc infecunditate laboratur; sed Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus, navibusque et casibus vita populi Romani permissa est."—TACITUS, Annal. xii. 43.

Antiquity does not contain a more pregnant and important passage, or one more directly bearing on the present policy of the Britsh emprire, than this. It demonstrates: 1, That in former times Italy had been an exporting country: "olim ex Italia commeatus in longinquas provincias portabantur." 2, That at the time when Tacitus wrote, in the days of the Emperor Trajan, it had ceased to be so, and had come to import largely from Africa and Lybia, "sed nunc Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus." 3, That this was not the result of any supervening sterility or unfruitfulness, "nec nunc infecunditate laboratur," but was from causes which made it more profitable to purchase grain in the Egyptian or Lybian markets, "sed Africam POTIUS et Egyptum exercemus."

Of the extent to which this decay of agriculture in the central provinces of the Roman empire went, in the latter stages of its history, we have the following striking account in the authentic pages of Gibbon:—