WHY OUR MANUFACTURERS WANT PROTECTION. 107 



in the aggregate to three or four hundred thousand pounds sterling in the course 

 of three or four years. If the efforts of those who encourage the combinations 

 to restrict the amount of labor and to produce strikes were to be successful for 

 any length of time, the great accumulations of capital could no longer be made 

 which enable a few of the most wealthy capitalists to overwhelm all foreign compe- 

 tition in times of great depression, and thus clear the way for the whole trade to 

 step in WHEN PRICES REVIVE, and to carry on a great business before/0r- 

 eign capital can again accumulate to such an extent as to be able to establish a 

 competition in prices with any chance of success. The large capitals of this 

 country are the great instruments of warfare against the competing capital of for- 

 eign cotmtries, and the most essential instruments now remaining BY WHICH 

 OUR MANUFACTURING SUPREMACY CAN BE MAINTAINED; the 

 other elements cheap labor, abundance of raw materials, means of communica- 

 tion, and, skilled labor being rapidly in process of being equalized. 



Under our present tariff system, these schemes of spoliation are 

 impracticable, so far as the United States are concerned. The 

 duties which must be paid at our custom houses, before foreign 

 goods can gain admission into this country, make a crusade upon 

 our industries, in the form of a ruinously cheapening process, too 

 costly to be undertaken, and too unlikely of success. Instead of 

 that, we have many and fulsome praises of the assumed blessings of 

 Free Trade. Unrestricted competition with pauper labor in 

 Europe, and with low interest on money, and with immense accu- 

 mulations of capital, is to pour a flood of cheap commodities into 

 the United States, to the great advantage of consumers. But what, 

 meantime, is to become of American producers ? When they shall 

 be ruined or driven out of business by the deluge of temporary 

 cheapness, what is to prevent the British manufacturers from mak- 

 ing a ruthless monopoly out of their possession and control of our 

 market, prices being forced up as high as the power of resistancer 

 will endure ? Under such circumstances, the cost of what is mis- 

 called Free Trade what is really the slavery of commerce- 

 would far exceed the cost of maintaining and prospering our own 

 industries. The fact is, the people most to be benefited by a 

 repeal of the duties on iron, steel, cottons, woolens, and other 

 staple articles, are the monopolizing capitalists across the ocean. 

 Intelligent Englishmen fully comprehend this truth. What they 

 think, in the sincerity of their hearts, of the policy of Free Trade, 

 is manifest from the following extract from a speech of a member 

 of the British Parliament, delivered at a time when the United 

 States had adopted the policy of Protection, and quoted by Henry 

 Clay, in 1832, in trie Senate of the United States. 



