rich, but also to alleviate the privations of the poor; but its beneficent operation in the latter direction is checked and counteracted by the vicious institutions just referred to; and civilisation is incomplete and abortive until those fertile causes of human misery are abolished. They can be abolished, for they exist through man's volition; and the power which instituted can annul them. That they will before long be abolished we earnestly trust, and we fervently entreat the co-operation of all who read these pages to that end. Every one can contribute something towards it by thought, or word, or deed, or vote. Let us never weary or despond, but pledge ourselves to work, and still to work, and ever to work, according to our means, in so holy a

cause.

CHAPTER XIII.

Commercial Isolation-Protectionist Fallacies-Balances Due by one Country to Another are not Paid in Specie-All Commerce is Barter.

B. 4. COMMERCIAL ISOLATION.-We have fully expatiated in our earlier pages on the manifold advantages afforded by the "Division of labour," and by "Free commercial intercourse." We therefore shall have the less to say as to the evils of "Commercial isolation." For the evils of the latter mainly consist in ignoring and abjuring the manifold advantages on which we have already so emphatically dwelt. The higher the estimation

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in which those advantages are held, the greater must be our appreciation of the evils and losses. incurred by curtailing our availment of them. That curtailment statesmen have effected by cutting off industrially one country from the other, and substituting narrow and sectional for world-wide international division of labour. Whether countries be large or small, the isolation system (that is to say the protective system), in its logical completeness, decides that the division of labour shall not carry its operations beyond the boundaries of each; that the people who dwell within those boundaries shall not avail themselves of the co-operation of the people who dwell beyond those boundaries; and that they shall each supply their own wants as though there were no other countries or people in existence. In this way they will be "independent of foreigners."

Foreigners! A term implying a certain measure of contumely and reproach, as though "foreigners" were not brother-men accidentally born under a different longitude and latitude, and accidentally placed, by barbaric mediæval brute force, in a distinct section of the globe called another country-as though "foreigners foreigners" were inborn enemies and natural objects of repulsion! Well, be it so. The isolated nation will be "independent of foreigners." Very true; but it will forfeit all the advantages of the division of labour on a large scale. It cannot possibly enjoy at once the incompatible privileges of isolation and of co-operation. Under the isolation system each country is to produce enough of everything for

its own wants, and therefore, as it takes nothing from the foreigner, so neither can it give the foreigner anything. Hence follows the abolition of foreign commerce as well as the curtailment of the division of labour, for the essence of both is free interchange. All commerce is substantially barter.

It is true that such complete isolation as this has seldom rewarded the efforts of Protectionism. But instances are not totally wanting. China and Japan, until recently, had succeeded in being quite "independent of foreigners;" and there are still some savage islands scattered throughout the ocean, the natives of which decline commercial intercourse with other nations, and protect the labour of their own people by refusing admittance to the products of foreign labour. If we accept the Protectionist principle that every country should be self-sufficing, the practice of these islanders is strictly logical. In most countries, however, the practice of Protectionism has fallen short of its principles, and it has succeeded only in curtailing, not in abolishing, commercial interchanges between people and people. It has, therefore, not been able totally to abolish, but only to curtail, the beneficent operations of the division of labour. The practice of Protectionism has, nevertheless, done infinite mischief, and would have done much more could its principle have been fully carried out. That it should not have been carried out is due, not to the principles of its supporters, but to the laws of Nature. Nature, by parcelling out the globe into an endless

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diversity of zones, climates, soils, &c., and assigning to each its special productions, has rendered compulsory a certain amount of interchanges between man and man, and has thus rebuked the doctrine that each country should be self-sufficing and independent of others.

To form a close estimate of the amount by which, had the principle of the division of labour been allowed full and free scope, the aggregate wealth of the world would have been increased, is manifestly impossible; but we might perhaps arrive at some rough notion of it. In a former chapter (see p. 24) we estimated the average percentage of the import duties which formed the frontier line between total prohibition from, and partial admission to, a protected country at forty per cent. In some cases it is much more, in others it is much less, but assuming forty per cent. as the average boundary which will, in spite of the duty, allow the admission of a certain quantity of foreign goods, the inference is obvious. Native goods must cost forty per cent. more than foreign goods. Of such articles, it is clear that the native producer can only produce one hundred, with the same expenditure of capital and labour as that with which the foreign producer can produce one hundred and forty. Hence it follows that, with free trade and universal and unimpeded division of labour among the fittest workers, one hundred and forty of such articles would have been produced for every one hundred that have been produced in protected countries, and the world would have been richer in that proportion. We shall not attempt the task of assessing the

value of all the commodities that are raised throughout the world under those conditions, and of which the cost is wilfully and uselessly enhanced forty per cent. by state interference with the self-directed flow of industry within its natural channels; but, without doubt, it must amount to an enormous and almost incredible annual sum.

The origin of this Protective system, which prohibits men from devoting their labour and capital to remunerative, and compels men to misdirect them to losing, pursuits is easily traceable to that war-engendered and war-engendering spirit of hostility between nation and nation, which is at once so needless and so baneful. The continuance of that system rests on the apathy of the multitude, who suffer in silence, because in ignorance of the cause on its active advocacy by the few whose private are in opposition to the public interests— and on the subservience of statesmen who are far more anxious to propitiate the active few than to thwart them for the sake of the indifferent many.

That the great bulk of the people in all countries should not be yet aware of the injustice inflicted on them by the system is perhaps hardly to be wondered at. Its evils are not obvious because the losses it occasions are minutely subdivided among the millions. On the other hand, its apparent gains to a small class are made conspicuous, because they are cumulated upon a few hundreds. Big factories and their busy workmen are, in protected countries, ostentatiously exhibited as the noble results of the system, with the sarcastic question, "Is it then your aim, O ye free-traders,