UG 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



In one respect the American advocates of 

 protection are exceptionally unfortunate. When 

 in 1844 and 1845 the "farmers' friends" were 

 delivering eloquent and gloomy prophecies at 

 market dinners, and in the House of Commons, 

 about the certain ruin of the agricultural interest 

 if the insane and wicked policy of the Anti-Corn 

 Law League ever became triumphant, we were 

 not exporting wheat to Odessa and Chicago, and 

 the price of wheat in Mark Lane was very much 

 higher than at New York or at the mouth of the 

 Danube. But the Lowell manufacturers who are 

 aghast at the prospect of free trade are actually 

 sending cotton-cloth to Manchester ; and in Amer- 

 ican retail " stores " cotton goods are marked at 

 a lower price than that at which goods of the 

 same quality could be sold in Liverpool or Lon- 

 don. It is the same with the other manufactur- 

 ing industries of America. The manufacturers 

 of hardware who think that they would have to 

 shut up their works if the duties on English 

 goods were abolished are beating us in market 

 after market from Hamburg to Melbourne. In 

 Birmingham itself merchants are importing from 

 the United States such articles as axes, hay-forks, 

 and agricultural implements of nearly every de- 

 scription, sash-pulleys, and " small castings " of 

 very many kinds, although it is estimated that 

 freight and other expenses add seventeen or 

 eighteen per cent, to the cost of the goods. 



The Russo-Turkish War ought to have shown 

 the American manufacturers that they have little 

 reason to fear us. Not a single cartridge, as far 

 as I know, has been made in Birmingham for 

 either Russia or Turkey ; but when I was in 

 Bridgeport, Connecticut, in November, the car- 

 tridge-factories had been running day and night 

 for months, and I saw a Russian commissioner 

 and a Turkish commissioner in the same works. 

 The Americans have made the rifles as well as 

 the cartridges for both combatants. When I 

 asked how it was that they had carried off the 

 orders from Birmingham, they told me that the 

 exchangeable parts of the American weapon are 

 more readily fitted than ours. This explanation 

 was confirmed by an eminent Birmingham manu- 

 facturer with whom I had some conversation on 

 the subject after I came home. He said that in 

 England we are accustomed to make the parts of 

 the rifle fit very tightly, and that the Americans 

 are satisfied with a loose fit ; so that when the 

 English rifle receives any damage, more time and 

 trouble are required to replace the injured part 

 than when an American rifle receives similar 

 damage. He also told me that he could never 



see that there was any practical advantage in the 

 closer accuracy of the English make. 



Spite of their tariff, the Americans may be 

 said to enjoy the advantages of free trade more 

 largely than any other nation in the world. They 

 are a confederation of States extending over a 

 territory that stretches from the Atlantic to the 

 Pacific, and from the tropics through nearly 

 twenty-five degrees of latitude. These States, 

 possessing every variety of climate and of soil, 

 rich in forests, in corn-land, in pasture, and in 

 mines, are separated from each other neither by 

 differences of language, nor by differences of gov- 

 ernment, nor by differences of currency. No line 

 of custom-houses divides State from State; their 

 commercial intercourse is absolutely unrestricted. 

 The Americans, therefore, argue that what might 

 be ruinous for England may be safe for them- 

 selves. It is obvious, however, that the very 

 wealth and variety of their internal resources de- 

 stroy every plausible economical argument for 

 prohibition. Already the professors of political 

 economy in every considerable college, with hardly 

 an exception, are free-traders ; and, notwithstand- 

 ing the cry of distress, which I believe has gone 

 up from Pennsylvania at the very moderate re- 

 duction of duties proposed in the Tariff Bill now 

 before Congress, there is little probability that 

 the policy of protection will last many years 

 longer. Commercial restrictions in any country 

 must always have an injurious effect on the nat- 

 ural and vigorous development of the industry of 

 the world, and for this reason it is very desirable, 

 in the interest both of Europe and of America, 

 that America should adopt the principles of free 

 trade. But, if the protective duties were swept 

 away to-morrow, I doubt whether our own manu- 

 facturing industry would receive at once the gen- 

 eral stimulus which some sanguine persons might 

 anticipate. Leeds and Bradford might become 

 more active; but that the Lancashire and Bir- 

 mingham manufacturers would recover their old 

 place in the American market seems to me ex- 

 tremely improbable. 



The agitation for the repeal or the evasion of 

 the act passed in 1875 for the resumption of 

 specie payments in 1879 was only beginning to 

 show its strength last autumn. Most of my New 

 England friends assumed that the repeal of the 

 act was not to be feared, and when I left the 

 country the Silver Bill of Mr. Bland had not 

 created any considerable excitement ; indeed I 

 am not sure whether at that time the bill was 

 actually before the House. The President was 

 known to be strongly in favor of " hard money," 



