106 WHY OUR MANUFACTURERS WANT PROTECTION. 



worn out with the unavailing struggle, and are driven out of busi- 

 ness or into bankruptcy. Meantime, the British schemers have 

 themselves lost heavily, but can well endure the strain of the 

 losses, on account of their much larger capital, coupled with prof- 

 its on their trade carried on with other countries, producers in 

 the United States generally not possessing such a compensating 

 advantage. The victory thus won, leaving our manufacturers 

 crippled or prostrated, their foreign rivals boldly step in for our 

 trade, which they monopolize with unsparing rapacity, prices often 

 being advanced, under these circumstances, to 50 and even 100 per 

 cent, on what they had been before the struggle began. The tem- 

 porary cheapness which beguiled and deluded our consumers dis- 

 appears altogether, instead of which they find themselves the help- 

 less dupes and victims of a heartless foreign extortion. With pos- 

 session and control of our market assured, British producers reim- 

 burse themselves for their losses out of the pockets of our people, 

 who are thus made to pay the cost of breaking down the barrier 

 erected to shield them against the merciless practices of transat- 

 lantic rapacity. Says B. F. French, in his "History of the Iron 

 Trade of the United States:" 



It is an established fact that, in many departments of English industry, those 

 who are interested will carry them on at a loss for years, to aid in retaining 

 markets from which they are in danger of being excluded by commercial re- 

 strictions or industrial competition; and scarcely a branch of industry has sprung 

 up in the United States which has not, at first, had to encounter a severe strug- 

 gle in consequence of the foreign article being reduced in price below that with 

 which it had been expected to compete. 



That this statement, in regard to certain manufacturing capital- 

 ists in England, misrepresents neither their acts nor their motives, 

 is made evident by the following open avowal which we find in an 

 official document. It occurs in a report presented to Parlia- 

 ment by a commission appointed in 1854 to inquire into the oper- 

 ation of an act relating to the mining population. Here it is: 



The laboring classes generally, in the manufacturing districts of this country, 

 and especially in the iron and coal districts, are very little aware of the extent to 

 which they are often indebted for their being employed at all to the immense 

 LOSSES which their employers voluntarily incur in bad times in order TO 

 DESTROY FOREIGN COMPETITION, AND TO GAIN AND KEEP POS- 

 SESSION OF FOREIGN MARKETS. Authentic instances are well known 

 of employers having, in such times, carried on their works at a loss amounting 



