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

"12. She has not even excluded from the benefit of these reductions the very countries under whose simultaneous enactments, of a hostile character, she is at this moment suffering: these advantages will be enjoyed by the tar and cordage of Russia; by the corn and timber, the woollens, linens, and hosiery of northern Germany; by the gloves, the boots and shoes, the light writing-papers, the perfumery, the corks, the straw-hats, the cottons and cambrics, the dressed skins, the thrown silk, and even (from an incidental charge with respect to the charge of duty on the bottles) the wines of France; by the salt provisions, the ashes, the turpentine, the rice, the furs and skins, the sperm oil of America; and she in particular may expect to derive advantage from the alteration in our colonial import duties upon the great articles of flour, salt, provisions, fish and lumber."15

Such have been the sacrifices which Great Britain has recently made in order to secure a system of free commercial enterprise throughout the world. Let us now enquire what return she has met with for these concessions; and the recent occurrences in this respect are detailed in the same unexceptionable authority.

"Within the last year, France has passed an ordinance, doubling the duty on linen yarns—a measure hostile enough, had it been uniform in its application to all countries; but, lest there should be any ambiguity about its meaning, she has actually left open her Belgian frontier to that article at the former duty, on the condition that Belgium should levy the high French duty in her custom-houses, so as to prevent the transit of the British yarns through that country. To this disreputable and humiliating proposal, Belgium has consented. Again, amidst the loudest professions from the Prussian government, of an anxiety to advance the relaxation of commercial restrictions, that government has, nevertheless, adopted a proceeding not less hostile or mischievous than the measure of France with regard to linen yarns. The Congress of the Deputies of the Zollverein, at Stuttgard, have in a new tariff, which was to take effect on the 1st of January, besides some minor alterations of an unfavourable kind, decreed, upon the proposal of Prussia, that goods mixed of cotton and wool, if of more than one colour, shall pay fifty thalers the centner, instead of thirty; that is, instead of a very high, shall be liable to an exorbitant, and, as it may prove, a prohibitory duty. Next, America, as all our readers must be aware, has, after a struggle, passed a tariff, subverting altogether the arrangement established by the Compromise Act of 1833, and imposing upon the various descriptions of manufactured goods rates of duty varying from thirty to forty and fifty per cent and upwards, which have had the effect of stopping a great portion of the shipments of cotton goods to that country from Great Britain during the past autumn, and, without doubt, have added greatly to the distresses of our manufacturing population. Besides these greater instances, Russia, according to her wont in such matters, and Spain, have published, within the test fifteen months, new tariffs, of which it is difficult to say whether they are still worse than, or only as execrably bad, as those which they succeeded, but, in the close rivalry between the old and the new, the latter seem, upon the whole, entitled to the palm of prohibitive rigour. And Portugal, likewise, has augmented the duties payable upon certain classes of her imports, by a measure of the recent date of March 1841, and by another of last year. In the mean time, Spain has concluded a treaty with Belgium for the admission of her linens. And the king of Prussia has effected an arrangement with the czar, which, in certain particulars, secures, upon his own frontier, a relaxation of the iron strictness of the Russian system. England has concluded no commercial treaty with any of these powers; and the negotiation with France, which the measures of Lord Palmerston interrupted in 1840, at the very period of its ripeness, appears still to slumber—owing, we believe, in part, to the prevalence of an anti-Anglican feeling in that country, which, for the credit of common sense and of human nature, we trust will be temporary; but much more to the high protective notions, and the political activity and influence of the French manufacturers, which overawe an administration far less strong, we regret to say, than it deserves."

Our recent attempts, therefore, to introduce a general system of free trade among nations have proved a signal failure, on the admission of the most enlightened advocates for that species of policy. Nor have our earlier efforts been more successful. Mr Huskisson, as it is well known, introduced, full twenty years ago, the system of free trade, and repealed the navigation laws, in the hope of making the Northern Powers of Europe more favourable to the admission of British manufactures, and materially reduced the duties on French silks, watches, wines, and jewellery, in the hope that the Government of that country would see the expedience of making a corresponding reduction in the duties levied on our staple manufactures in the French harbours. But after twenty years' experience of these concessions on our part, the French Government are so far from evincing a disposition to meet us with a similar conciliatory policy, that they have done just the reverse. Scarce a year has elapsed without some additional duty being imposed on our fabrics in their harbours; and the great reductions contained in Sir R. Peel's tariff were immediately met, as already noticed, by the imposition of an additional and very heavy duty on British linens. Nay, so far has the free trade system been from enlarging the market for our manufactures in Europe, that after twenty years' experience of its effects, and an increase over Europe generally of fully a third in numbers, and at least a half in wealth, it is an ascertained fact, that our exports to the European-States are less than they were forty years ago.16 "That part of our commerce," says Mr Porter, himself a decided free trader, "which, being carried on with the rich and civilized inhabitants of European nations, should present the greatest field for extension, will be seen to have fallen off in a remarkable degree. The annual average exports to the whole of Europe were less in value by nearly twenty per cent, on an average of five years, from 1832 to 1836, than they were during the five years that followed the close of the war; and it affords strong evidence of the unsatisfactory footing on which our trading regulations with Europe are established, that our exports to the United States of America, which, with their population of 12,000,000, (in 1837,) are situated 3000 miles from us across the Atlantic, have amounted to more than half the sum of our shipments to the whole of Europe, with a population fifteen times as great as that of the United States of America, and with an abundance of productions suited to our wants, which they are naturally desirous of exchanging for the produce of our mines and looms."17

This was written by Mr Porter in 1837; but while subsequent times have evinced an increased anxiety on the part of this country to extend the principles of free trade, they have been met by such increased determination on the part of the European governments to resist the system, and adhere more rigorously to their protecting policy, that the disproportion is now universal, and is every day becoming more remarkable. The following table will show that our exports to Europe, notwithstanding our twelve reciprocity treaties with its maritime powers, and unceasing efforts to give a practical exemplification of the principles of free trade, are stationary or declining.18

In one particular instance, the entire failure of the free trade system to procure any corresponding return from the very continental states whose harbours it was chiefly intended to open, has been singularly conspicuous. In February 1821 the reciprocity system, in regard to shipping, was introduced by Mr Huskisson, and acted upon by the legislature; and the following reason was assigned by that eminent man for deviating from the old navigation laws of Cromwell, which had so long constituted the strength of the British navy. Mr Huskisson maintained—"That the period had now arrived, when it had become indispensable to introduce a more liberal system in regard to the admission of foreign shipping into our harbours, if we would avoid the total exclusion of our manufacturers into their harbours. The exclusive system did admirably well, as long as we alone acted upon it; when foreign nations were content to take our goods, though we excluded their shipping. But they had now become sensible of the impolicy of such a system, and, right or wrong, were resolved to resist it. Prussia, in particular, had resisted all the anxious endeavours of this country, to effect the introduction of goods of our manufacture, on favourable terms, into her harbours; and the reason assigned was, that the navigation laws excluded her shipping from ours. The reciprocity system has been rendered indispensable by the prohibitory system, which the other European powers have adopted. The only means of meeting the heavy duties they have imposed on our goods and shipping, is to place our duties upon a system of perfect reciprocity with theirs. Foreign nations have no advantage over us in the carrying trade: from the London report, it clearly appeared, that the ships of Norway, Sweden, Russia, Prussia, France, and Holland, cannot compete with British, either in long or short voyages. But at any rate, the repeal of our discriminating duties has become matter of necessity, if we would propose any trade with these countries."19

Such were Mr Huskisson's reasons. They were grounded on alleged necessity. He said in substance:—"The navigation laws are very good things; and if we could only persuade other nations to take our goods, while we virtually shut out their shipping, it would, doubtless, be very advisable to continue the present system. But you can no longer do this. Foreign nations see the undue advantage which has been so long obtained of them. They insist upon an exchange of interests. We, as the richer and the more powerful, are called on to make the first advances. We must relinquish our navigation laws in favor of their staple manufacture, shipping, if we would induce them to admit, on favourable terms, our staple article, cotton goods." These were Mr Huskisson's principles; and it may be admitted that, in the abstract, they were well-founded, for all commercial intercourse, to be beneficial and lasting, must be founded on a mutual exchange of advantages. But, in carrying into execution this principle, he committed a fatal mistake, which has already endangered, without the slightest advantage, and, if persevered in, may ultimately destroy the commercial superiority of Great Britain. He virtually repealed, by the 4 Geo. IV. c. 77 and the 5 Geo. IV. c. 1, the navigation laws, by authorizing the King, by an order in council, to permit the exportation and importation of goods in foreign vessels, on payment of the same duties as where chargeable on British vessels, in favour of those countries which did not levy discriminating duties on British vessels bringing goods into their harbours, and to levy on the vessels of such countries the same tonnage duties as they charged on British vessels. This was, in effect, to say—We will admit your vessels on the same terms on which you admit ours; and nothing, at first sight, could seem more equitable.

But, nevertheless, this system involved a fatal mistake, the pernicious effects of which have now been amply demonstrated by experience, and which lies at the bottom of the whole modern doctrines of free trade. It stipulates for no advantages corresponding to the concession made, and thus the reciprocity was on one side only. Mr Huskisson repealed, in favour of the Baltic powers, the British navigation laws; that is, he threw open to Baltic competition, without any protection, the British shipping interest: but he forgot to exact from them any corresponding favour for British iron or cotton goods in the Baltic harbours. He said—"We will admit your shipping on the same terms on which you admit ours." What he should have said is—"We will admit your shipping into our harbors on the same term you admit our cotton goods into your harbours." This would have been real reciprocity, because each side would have given free ingress to that staple commodity in which its neighbor had the advantage; and thus the most important branch of industry of each would have been secured an inlet into the other's territories. The British tonnage might have been driven out of the Baltic trade by the shipowners of Denmark and Norway, but the Prussian cotton manufacturers would have been crushed by the British. It might then have come to be a question of whether the upholding of our shipping interest or the extension of our cotton manufactures was the most advisable policy. But no such question need be considered now. We have gained nothing by exposing our shipping interest to the ruinous competition of the Baltic vessels. The Danish, Norwegian and Prussian ships have come into our harbours, but the British cotton and iron goods have not entered theirs. The reciprocity system has been all on one side. After having been twenty years in operation, it has failed in producing the smallest concession in favour of British manufactures, or producing in those states with whom the reciprocity treaties were concluded, the smallest extension of British exports. Since we so kindly permitted it, they have taken every thing and given nothing. They have done worse. They have taken good and returned evil. The vast concession contained in the repeal of our navigation laws, has been answered by the enhanced duties contained in the Prussian Zollverein. Twenty-six millions of Germans have been arrayed under a commercial league, which, by levying duties, practically varying from thirty to fifty, though nominally only ten per cent, effectually excludes British manufactures; and, after twenty years' experience, our exports are only a few hundred thousands a year, and our exports of cotton manufactures only a few hundreds a year, to the whole States of Northern Europe, in favour of whom the navigation laws were swept away, and an irreparable wound inflicted on British maritime interests, and in whose wants Mr Huskisson anticipated a vast market for our manufacturing industry, and an ample compensation for the diminution of our shipping interest.

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.