TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 901 
instructors, and seldom paid them any fee, beyond a safe harbour from political and 
religious persecution. And modern Englishmen could not realise, as Americans, and 
even Germans, could fifty years ago, the difficulties of a manufacturer taking part 
in starting a new industry, when he came to England to beg or steal a knowledge of 
the trade, and to induce skilful artisans to come back with him, He seldom got 
the very best; for they were sure of a comfortable life at home, and were perhaps 
not without some ambition of rising to be masters themselves. He had to pay their 
travelling expenses, and to promise them very high wages; and when all was done, 
they often left him to become the owners of the 160 acres allotted to every free 
settler; or, the bitterest pill of all, they sold their skill to a neighbouring employer 
who had been looking on at the experiment, and, as soon as it showed signs of pro- 
sperity, stepped in, improved on the first experiments, and reaped a full harvest on 
a soil that had been made ready by others. 
Again, the pioneer manufacturer had to bring over specialised machinery, and 
specialised skill to take care of it. If any part went wrong, or was superseded, the 
change cost him ten times as much as his English competitor. He had to be self- 
sufficing : he could get no help from the multitude of subsidiary industries, which 
in England would have lent him aid at every turn. He had a hundred pitfalls on 
every side: if he failed, his failure was full of lessons to those who came after; 
if he succeeded, the profits to himself would be trivial as compared with those to 
his country. When he told the tale of his struggles, every word went home to: 
his hearers ; and when the English economists, instead of setting themselves to 
discover the best method by which his country might help him in his experiment, 
said he was flying in the face of Nature, and called him a selfish schemer for want- 
ing any help at all, they put themselves out of court. 
§ 3. But the failure of English economists to allow for the special circumstances 
of new countries did not end here, They saw that Protective taxes in England had 
raised the price of wheat by their full amount (because the production of wheat 
obeys the Law of Diminishing Return ; and in an old country, such as England, 
increased supplies could be raised only at a more than proportionately increased 
cost of labour) ; that the high price of bread had kept a large part of the popula- 
tion on insufficient rations; that it had enriched the rich at the expense of a much 
greater loss to the rest of the nation; and that this loss had fallen upon those who 
were unable to lose material wealth without also losing physical, and even mental 
and moral strength; and that even those miseries of the overworked factory 
women and children, which some recent German writers have ascribed exclu- 
sively to recklessness of manufacturing competition in its ignorant youth, were 
really caused chiefly by the want of freedom for the entry of food. They were 
convinced, rightly, as I believe, that the benefits claimed for Protection in England 
were based, without exception, on false reasoning; and they fought against it with 
the honest, but also rather blind, energy of a religious zeal. 
Thus they overlooked the fact that many of those indirect effects of Protection 
which aggravated then, and would aggravate now, its direct evils in England, 
worked in the opposite direction in America. For, first, the more America ex- 
ported her raw produce in return for manufacture, the less the benefit she got from 
the Law of Increasing Return as regards those goods that she manufactured for 
herself; and thus her case was contrasted with England, who could manufacture 
them more cheaply for her own use the more of her manufactures she sent abroad 
to buy raw produce; and for this and other reasons, a Protective tax did not 
nearly always raise the cost of goods to the American consumer by its full amount. 
And, secondly, Protection in America did not, as in England, tax the industrial 
classes for the benefit of the wealthy class of landlords. On the contrary, in so far 
as it fell upon the exporters of American produce, it pressed on those who had 
received large free gifts of public land; and there was no primd facie injustice in 
awarding to the artisans, by special taxation, a small part of the fruits of that land, 
the direct ownership of which had not been divided between farmers and artisans, 
as it equitably might have been, but had been given exclusively to the former. 
§ 4. I have touched on but a few out of many aspects of the problem. But 
perhaps I may stop here, and yet venture to express my own opinion on the con- 
