The allegation of the school, that the system of protectionoccasions unjust and anti-economical encroachments by the power ofthe State against the employment of the capital and industry ofprivate individuals, appears in the least favourable light if weconsider that it is the foreign commercial regulations which allowsuch encroachments on our private industry to take place, and thatonly by the aid of the system of protection are we enabled tocounteract those injurious operations of the foreign commercialpolicy.If the English shut out our corn from their markets, whatelse are they doing than compelling our agriculturists to grow somuch less corn than they would have sent out to England undersystems of free importation? If they put such heavy duties on ourwool, our wines, or our timber, that our export trade to Englandwholly or in great measure ceases, what else is thereby effectedthan that the power of the English nation restricts proportionatelyour branches of production? In these cases a direction is evidentlygiven by foreign legislation to our capital and our personalproductive powers, which but for the regulations made by it theywould scarcely have followed.It follows from this, that were we todisown giving, by means of our own legislation, a direction to ourown national industry in accordance with our own nationalinterests, we could not prevent foreign nations from regulating ournational industry after a fashion which corresponds with their ownreal or presumed advantage, and which in any case operatesdisadvantageously to the development of our own productive powers.
But can it possibly be wiser on our part, and more to the advantageof those who nationally belong to us, for us to allow our privateindustry to be regulated by a foreign national Legislature, inaccordance with foreign national interests, rather than regulate itby means of our own Legislature and in accordance with our owninterests? Does the German or American agriculturist feel himselfless restricted if he has to study every year the English Acts ofParliament, in order to ascertain whether that body deems itadvantageous to encourage or to impose restrictions on hisproduction of corn or wool, than if his own Legislature imposescertain restrictions on him in respect of foreign manufacturedgoods, but at the same time insures him a market for all hisproducts, of which he can never again be deprived by foreignlegislation?
If the school maintains that protective duties secure to thehome manufacturers a monopoly to the disadvantage of the homeconsumers, in so doing it makes use of a weak argument.For asevery individual in the nation is free to share in the profits ofthe home market which is thus secured to native industry, this isin no respect a private monopoly, but a privilege, secured to allthose who belong to our nation, as against those who nationallybelong to foreign nations, and which is the more righteous and justinasmuch as those who nationally belong to foreign nations possessthemselves the very same monopoly, and those who belong to us aremerely thereby put on the same footing with them.It is neither aprivilege to the exclusive advantage of the producers, nor to theexclusive disadvantage of the consumers; for if the producers atfirst obtain higher prices, they run great risks, and have tocontend against those considerable losses and sacrifices which arealways connected with all beginnings in manufacturing industry.Butthe consumers have ample security that these extraordinary profitsshall not reach unreasonable limits, or become perpetual, by meansof the competition at home which follows later on, and which, as arule, always lowers prices further than the level at which they hadsteadily ranged under the free competition of the foreigner.If theagriculturists, who are the most important consumers to themanufacturers, must also pay higher prices, this disadvantage willbe amply repaid to them by increased demands for agriculturalproducts, and by increased prices obtained for the latter.
It is a further sophism, arrived at by confounding the theoryof mere values with that of the powers of production, when thepopular school infers from the doctrine, 'that the wealth of thenation is merely the aggregate of the wealth of all individuals init, and that the private interest of every individual is betterable than all State regulations to incite to production andaccumulation of wealth,' the conclusion that the national industrywould prosper best if only every individual were left undisturbedin the occupation of accumulating wealth.That doctrine can beconceded without the conclusion resulting from it at which theschool desires thus to arrive; for the point in question is not (aswe have shown in a previous chapter) that of immediately increasingby commercial restrictions the amount of the values of exchange inthe nation, but of increasing the amount of its productive powers.
But that the aggregate of the productive powers of the nation isnot synonymous with the aggregate of the productive powers of allindividuals, each considered separately -- that the total amount ofthese powers depends chiefly on social and Political conditions,but especially on the degree in which the nation has renderedeffectual the division of labour and the confederation of thepowers of production within itself -- we believe we havesufficiently demonstrated in the preceding chapters.