294 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



scanty and processes are simple there are no division and no asso- 

 ciation of labor. The account that one of the best of American 

 historians gives of the Northwest Territory might be accepted as a de- 

 scription of this primitive state, and realizes Fichte's ideal of a 

 geschlossener Handelstaat (closed trade state). Shut in by moun- 

 tains, the people raised their own flax and sometimes grew their 

 own wool, which they spun and wove at home. They made their 

 own spinning wheels and looms, as they made their own furni- 

 ture. They tanned their own leather and cobbled rude shoes of 

 it. Of Indian-corn husks they spun ropes and manufactured 

 horse collars and chair bottoms. Barrels and beehives were formed 

 of sawn hollow trees. They extracted sugar from the maple 

 and tea from the sassafras root. Their boats were dug-out canoes. 

 In colonies of later foundation this self-sufficing stage, which re- 

 peats an earlier period in the mother country than the time when 

 the colony was given off, is dropped, though there are traces of 

 it everywhere to be found. Sheep countries give birth to the woolen 

 industry. New Zealand reduplicates the woolen manufactures of 

 England and, owing to protective duties, has attained a deserved 

 success. New South Wales, with finer wools, has not succeeded, for 

 no other apparent reason than that she refuses to impose such duties. 

 For it is to be observed that it is under legislative protection — boun- 

 ties, bonuses, drawbacks, export and especially import duties — that 

 almost every colonial industry has grown up, as the industries of the 

 mother country grew up. Sometimes the profit in a particular under- 

 taking is exactly equal to the amount of the import duty, and it is 

 seldom greater. By taking extravagant advantage of the liberty 

 long refused (as leave to manufacture was long refused to the North 

 American colonies), but at length conceded, to impose import duties, 

 an Australasian colony, misled as much by its own splendid energy 

 as by evil counselors (Carlyle among them), built up a whole arti- 

 ficial system of industries which sank in ruinous collapse when the 

 boom had passed. Independent industries spring first from the soil. 

 Gold and silver mining lose their wild adventurous character, and 

 become regular industries, worked by companies with extensive 

 plants. The digging of gum in Auckland (bled from the gigantic 

 Kauri pine) is operated by merchants who keep the gum diggers in a 

 species of serfage. The discovery of coal makes native industries 

 possible or remunerative, but till iron has been found the system is 

 incomplete. All countries, and therefore all colonies, are late in 

 reaching this stage; the most advanced contemporary colonies have 

 not yet reached it. None the less have they followed England with 

 swifter steps, if with less momentum, into the modern age of iron — 

 that Brummagem epoch which has the creation of markets for its war 



