ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 75 



industrial arts in their respective countries. They have liberally 

 and constantly kept up the system of offering rewards for inven- 

 tions, discoveries or better methods, and to these rewards are 

 due many of those discoveries in chemistry, which have been ap- 

 plied with so much efiffict in the useful arts. It is a prevalent 

 opinion in the United States that these countries owe their present 

 preeminence, as manufacturing nations, to the fostering influence of 

 protective laws which they were able to relax or dispense with 

 when their manufactures became firmly establislied. But my nar- 

 rative, I think, will have shown that other and far more effectual 

 means have been employed. Mill, the latest of English 

 writers upon political economy, while condemning the doctrine 

 of protection, generally, admits that an exceptional case may 

 exist where a country is better adapted for some particular 

 kind of manufacture than tlie countries which cany it on 

 but has not the experience and skill of those who were earlier in 

 the field. In such a case, he says, it is not to be expected 

 that individuals should at their own risk and certain loss 

 introduce a new manufacture and bear the burden of carrying it 

 on until the producers are educated up to the level of those of 

 other countries, and that a protective duty continued for a reason- 

 able time will sometimes be the least inconvenient mode in which 

 a nation can try itself, until it obtains the requisite skill and ex- 

 perience. He says the protection should be confined to cases in 

 whicli there is good ground for believing that the industry which 

 it fosters will after some time be able to dispense with its aid, and 

 that the domestic producers should not be allowed to expect that 

 it will be continued to them beyond the time necessary for a fair 

 trial. This, in my opinion, is confining it to a case requiring what 

 it is always difficult to obtain, very discriminating legislation. 

 Protection is an advantage given at the expense of the nation, 

 and where it is allovved for one manufacture others will be clam- 

 orous, as has been the case in this country, to have it extended 

 to them. The principle being once conceded self-interest will 

 lead to mutual co-operation, until a law is obtained, extending it 

 a large variety of objects. ' If it be true, moreover, that a 

 country is better adapted for a particular kind of manufactures 

 than the countries which carry it on, the self-interest of individuals 

 will soon discover it and be able to take advantage of it without 

 the aid- of -protective law. The serious and permanent objec- 

 tion is that as protection raises the inferior domestic article 

 to an equality with the superior foreign fabric, which is ex- 

 cluded by the heavy duty put upon it, there is no longer a 



