32 IV. G. Langworthy Taylor 



of this study. If the movement is not propagated all along the 

 line, then the particular industry must fall out of the great world 

 market, and be an example of reversion to a primitive or to a 

 premature enterprise, as the case may be. 



The regime of protective tariffs affords one of the best exam- 

 ples of the psychic conjuncture, because it is one of the most 

 psychic institutions and most difficult to trace in its dependence 

 upon the materialistic conjuncture and in its industrial effects. 

 In the frequent tinkerings of the tariff we are to see chiefly the 

 actions and reactions to be considered under the industrial 

 process. In the difference in tariff policy between different coun- 

 tries, we see reflected the differences in the other elements of their 

 respective conjunctures, and most obviously in their materialistic 

 conjunctures. Thus, it is generally recognized that the domi- 

 nance of free trade convictions in England is assignable to its 

 geographical position at the center of the commercial world, to 

 the decay of its agriculture, which has rendered it still more a 

 commercial country, and finally to foreign competition with its 

 manufactures, which has brought its carrying trade into still 

 greater prominence. A carrying trade abhors tariffs. So 

 well had England succeeded in making herself the "workshop 

 of the world" that all other nations were convinced that the infant 

 industries argument applied to them, and raised high tariffs. 



So much as to the respective policies of the different countries ; 

 but, in the larger theater in which we are chiefly interested, the 

 elemental economic forces work themselves out less in the light 

 of man's consciousness. No one is concerned to plan the tariff 

 policy of the whole world — its benefits to mankind. Free traders 

 dwell on this subject, perhaps, academically, but on the hustings 

 we hear no note but national self-interest. How is it, then, that 

 without conscious plan the concert of nations vibrates from modi- 

 fied free trade to high protection, and back again ? x A suggestive 

 solution of this enigma was that of Mr. David A. Wells, who 

 remarked that the protectionism of the eighties was a reaction 

 from the fever heat of production and exchange which had been 



1 The facts of the world-fluctuations of tariff and free trade are stated in 

 the writer's article, Protection, Expansion, and International Competition, 

 Annals of the Am. Acad, of Pol. and Soc. Science, Jan., 1904. 



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