These maxims were in former times plainly professed by allEnglish ministers and parliamentary speakers.The ministers ofGeorge I in 1721 openly declared, on the occasion of theprohibition of the importation of the manufactures of India, thatit was clear that a nation could only become wealthy and powerfulif she imported raw materials and exported manufactured goods.Evenin the times of Lords Chatham and North, they did not hesitate todeclare in open Parliament that it ought not to be permitted thateven a single horse-shoe nail should be manufactured in NorthAmerica.In Adam Smith's time, a new maxim was for the first timeadded to those which we have above stated, namely, to conceal thetrue policy of England under the cosmopolitical expressions andarguments which Adam Smith had discovered, in order to induceforeign nations not to imitate that policy.
It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attainedthe summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he hasclimbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing upafter him.In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrineof Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his greatcontemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the BritishGovernment administrations.
Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictionson navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigationto such a degree of development that no other nation can sustainfree competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw awaythese ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations thebenefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that shehas hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for thefirst time succeeded in discovering the truth.
William Pitt was the first English statesman who clearlyperceived in what way the cosmopolitical theory of Adam Smith couldbe properly made use of, and not in vain did he himself carry abouta copy of the work on the Wealth of Nations.His speech in 1786,which was addressed neither to Parliament nor to the nation, butclearly to the ears of the statesmen of France, who were destituteof all experience and political insight, and solely intended toinfluence the latter in favour of the Eden Treaty, is an excellentspecimen of Smith's style of reasoning.By nature he said Francewas adapted for agriculture and the production of wine, as Englandwas thus adapted to manufacturing production.These nations oughtto act towards one another just as two great merchants would do whocarry on different branches of trade and who reciprocally enrichone another by the exchange of goods.(2*) Not a word here of theold maxim of England, that a nation can only attain to the highestdegree of wealth and power in her foreign trade by the exchange ofmanufactured products against agricultural products and rawmaterials.This maxim was then, and has remained since, an EnglishState secret; it was never again openly professed, but was all themore persistently followed.If, however, England since WilliamPitt's time had really cast away the protective system as a uselesscrutch, she would now occupy a much higher position than she does,and she would have got much nearer to her object, which is tomonopolise the manufacturing power of the whole world.Thefavourable moment for attaining this object was clearly just afterthe restoration of the general peace.Hatred of Napoleon'sContinental system had secured a reception among all nations of theContinent of the doctrines of the cosmopolitical theory.Russia,the entire North of Europe, Germany, the Spanish peninsula, and theUnited States of North America would have considered themselvesfortunate in exchanging their agricultural produce and rawmaterials for English manufactured goods.France herself wouldperhaps have found it possible, in consideration of some decidedconcessions in respect of her wine and silk manufactures, to departfrom her prohibitive system.
Then also the time had arrived when, as Priestley said of theEnglish navigation laws, it would be just as wise to repeal theEnglish protective system as it had formerly been to introduce it.
The result of such a policy would have been that all thesurplus raw materials and agricultural produce from the twohemispheres would have flowed over to England, and all the worldwould have clothed themselves with English fabrics.All would havetended to increase the wealth and the power of England.Under suchcircumstances the Americans or the Russians would hardly have takenit into their heads in the course of the present century tointroduce a protective system, or the Germans to establish acustoms union.People would have come to the determination withdifficulty to sacrifice the advantages of the present moment to thehopes of a distant future.