OF AMERICA. 21 



produce who are inexpert, constitutes a very large percentage 

 on their production, and a large percentage on the total pro- 

 duction of the world means a sum to which S340, 000,000 

 is a trifle. As things are, to take the world at large, the 

 human race do not produce perhaps the hundredth part of 

 what they might produce if their labour were properly and 

 intelligently applied. The greatest creator of wealth at the 

 smallest cost is division of labour, and whatever interferes 

 with it is an obstruction to human productiveness. Every 

 man ought to be allowed to do the work which early edu- 

 cation, long experience, natural aptitude, peculiarity of posi- 

 tion, or other circumstances enable him to do best ; and 

 that legislature is sadly mischievous which shunts him off 

 from the right on to the wrong line, and compels him to lay 

 aside the work which he can do well and take to that which 

 others can do better. 



It may perhaps be asked, " How are the Eastern manu- 

 facturers, and the workmen they employ, to live if the 

 farmers withdraw the yearly subsidy which is their only 

 support ?" The answer is easy. The increased imports which 

 the abolition of Customs duties would bring about would 

 necessitate increased exports to the same amount to pay for 

 them ; for there can be no additional import without a 

 corresponding additional export. There would arise a brisk 

 demand for fresh capital and labour to produce those 

 increased exports, and that demand would absorb whatever 

 capital and labour might be set free by the diminished 

 consumption of the Eastern States manufactures. It is 

 quite an exploded notion that if you import what you made 

 before, workmen are thrown out of work. It is not so; 

 they are merely thrown on to other work to supply the 

 articles that Avill be exported to pay for the new imports. 

 The same amount of American capital and labour would be 

 employed as before, with this difference, that then, their 

 operations would be remunerative, whereas before, they 

 were not. No doubt this transference of capital and labour 

 from one kind of business to another is attended with 

 temporary inconvenience and delay to the parties interfered 



