736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



know the truth are constantly dropping into expressions conformable 

 only to a false theory ; just as we all speak of a " favorable balance 

 of trade," when we know the expression conveys a wrong idea. 



In regard to allotment of specialties or industries the theory which 

 finds readiest and commonest expressions, even among those who know 

 better, is that each task should be done by the one most capable of 

 doing it, each industry carried on by the class, community, or country 

 by which it can be done with the least outlay of labor and capital. 

 By most people this is regarded as an axiom, needing no proof because 

 admitting of no denial. They are as sure of it as their ancestors were 

 that the sun daily revolves around the earth. 



In all the hot disputes with which the free-traders and protection- 

 ists have enlivened the politics and enlightened the minds of the pop- 

 ulace, they have rarely if ever failed to agree on the axiomatic truth 

 of this falsehood. One wants free trade because it will secure to each 

 industry a development in the country whose natural resources are 

 best adapted to it. The other is able to prove, in a particular case, 

 that his own is that country, and that therefore the Government should 

 step in and bring about the development which somehow fails to come 

 of its own accord. The free-trader assumes that the natural laws of 

 trade will bring about a certain state of things which the protection- 

 ist is able to prove that they do not, but is free to confess that they 

 would, after a few years of governmental " encouragement." 



Torrence found out the true theory as applied to international 

 trade ; Ricardo enlarged upon it, and for a time secured the credit of 

 its invention ; Mill made a complicated mathematical demonstration 

 of it ; and more recent writers have been content to briefly repeat 

 their argument, and give it the same extremely limited application. 

 The English economists discovered that under the system of free 

 trade their country imported things which could have been made with 

 less capital and labor at home. In order to silence the protectionists, 

 who had made the same discovery, they set about to find some excuse 

 for it. In the course of the search they discovered what they con- 

 ceived to be a great mathematical principle ; but they were careful to 

 explain that it applied only to international specialization, and to give 

 the reason why it should. Capital moves freely, they said, within na- 

 tional bounds, but it does not freely cross them. This argument has 

 had a surprising longevity, considering that it is not the poor coun- 

 tries, but the rich ones, which import the things they could produce 

 with little effort. 



In our widening field of observation, which has the further merit 

 of lying all about us within easy reach, we shall find many after-illus- 

 trations, and a sufficient number of more satisfactory explanations of 

 this so-called economic paradox. It is not alone, nor chiefly, in for- 

 eign trade that we must and do leave to others tasks that we can do 

 better than they. It is, in fact, a universal and striking feature of 



