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the week, but he works and produces during six days. The price of the goods can be lowered, for the reduction of wages has diminished the cost of production, and there are as many things made as previously. Fresh buyers come in who could not afford the former price. Even Even if the employer earns no profit, he may be saved from loss till the wealth of the country has expanded. More is produced on such a system in the various industries all round. The power of buying is thus increased, for there is more to give in exchange. The depression is attacked, face to face, in its very heart; the waste which created that depression is gradually restored by enlarged production, and, with the growth of commodities made, profits and wages are benefited together.

But there is another additional fallacy contained in the demand for short time. It involves the assumption that a minimum rate of wages can be decreed and enforced at the pleasure of the laborers. No more egregious delusion can befall wretched mortals. In all purchases the buyer is supreme. He decides whether the article. shall be bought; and, if the price exceeds either his means or his desire to acquire the article, there will be no purchase. Nor will he be without other resources. He will betake himself to other sellers; he will fall back upon the competition of foreign producers, who work longer hours, and probably with more good will. This is a consideration of very serious import to a nation like England, which owes her commercial greatness, and with it the very existence of a large portion of her population, to her command of distant markets all over the world. The demand for a minimum wage, if one could conceive it to be persisted in, might bring countless English laborers, not only to the workhouse, but to starvation.

The sufferings of stagnant trade have brought home this thought of foreign rivals to the feelings of impoverished masters and workmen in many countries. Even in England, the stronghold of free trade, the cry for protection is increasingly heard. Not that protection is demanded in plain terms; for the people of England are profoundly convinced that protection is nothing but pure folly. It is disguised under the pleasant name of reciprocity, which is simply protection with an excuse for it. "The French refuse to buy our cottons," exclaims the embittered cotton-spinner; "let England retaliate by refusing to buy French silks. We shall thus accomplish two things we shall punish France, and do good to the distressed silk-manufacturers of England. They will be protected against competing strangers with their long hours of working and low

wages. The national industries shall not be extinguished by an invasion so cruel."

But will this do any good to the cotton-spinner himself? for there is the rub. In truth, this language is scarcely rational-to be excused by a natural feeling of resentment for a supposed wrong. Reciprocity asks for the imposition of protection when it dares not say that protection can be defended, least of all by a motive which has no connection whatever with the trade in whose behalf it is demanded. Protect the silk-maker because the cottonspinner is hurt this is reciprocity in its full nakedness. A few truisms, it is believed, will suffice to make this clear.

The first thing that protection does is, to ask where the goods were made; its action turns upon the nationality of the merchandise. But what has the place where the goods were made to do with the buying and the selling of them? What rational principle can be pleaded for thrusting in the nationality of the goods between buyer and seller? The price and the quality of the goods are the only things which concern them. Be the two men of the same nation, or be they, one a Frenchman, the other an Englishman, Tros Tyriusve, what matters it? "Oh!" the thoughtless reply, "the English buy French goods, but the French will not buy English goods in return." Then with what does the Englishman make the purchase? Trade is nothing but an exchange of goods of equal value. No one, be it man or nation, can buy unless it also sells. The English must give the French what their goods are worth, or they will never get them. "Exactly so," it is replied. "The French may choose to say that they want nothing which England produces; they may insist on being paid in money. If so, what is the harm?" Money is ever introducing confusion into this very simple subject. England does not grow gold in her fields. If the Frenchmen insist on having gold, then England can not buy the French goods, unless some other country has given her gold in exchange for her goods; she passes that gold on to the French, and there the matter ends. She has indirectly, but very really, given goods for goods; she has sold as much as she has bought. There is no loss on either side; each produces an equal worth of goods to exchange. It may make the explanation clearer if it be allowed to repeat here a passage which bears directly on this subject:

The truth stands out in clear sunshine. Free trade can not and does not injure domestic industry. Under free trade foreign countries give in every case as much employment to English workmen and capitalists as if nothing

had been bought abroad. English goods of the same value must be purchased by the foreigner, or the trade comes to an end. There must be an equal amount of English goods made and sent away, or England will never obtain the foreign commodities. Free trade never does harm to the country which practices it; and that mighty fact alone kills protection. Let those who are backsliding into protection be asked, Can and will the foreigner give away his goods to any country without insisting on receiving back, directly or indirectly, an equal quantity of that country's goods? Let the question be pushed home, and all talk about injury to domestic industry must cease ("Chapters on Practical Political Economy," p. 307).

But how does protection act? It imposes a duty on the foreignmade article, and not on the one made at home. Thus, the price of the foreign commodity is raised-always to a height sufficient to make it dearer than its domestic competitor, or even to exclude it from the home market altogether. By this intervention, the home commodity, which was driven from the market by its naturally higher price, becomes the cheaper of the two, and commands the market in consequence. But who pays the duty, or else the excess of price, of the domestic above that of the foreign article if it had been allowed to come in free? The home buyers; that is, the whole people of the country which imposes protection. They pay more to their own countrymen than they would have had to pay to the foreign maker. The difference is a tax imposed to support certain persons who would be unable to maintain themselves by the trade in which they are engaged. Clearly, then, it is a poor-rate paid by the protecting nation at its own cost, given to the home makers, an impoverishment of the public wealth, which they consume and destroy without giving any compensation for it beyond what the foreigner would have bestowed at his lower price.

Protection is an erroneous policy; but it raises a fair issue : Shall the supplies which a nation wants be made at home or abroad? And it can allege reasons plausible at first sight. But reciprocity, as it is now put, can plead none but childish reasons in its own behalf. It does not say that protection is a wise policy: far from it. But it says, in England, for instance: "The American diminishes our trade by putting a duty on English iron. He diminishes his own trade also, it is true, and he puts a tax on the American people, which they themselves have to pay. Still, he hurts us: let us hurt him in turn." "But what good will that do us? Will it increase our trade? Will it cure our depression?" "Not at all. But it will punish him; and let us have this gratification, even though we can obtain it only by

taxing ourselves, and in addition contracting our already depressed trade." Is it possible that any one grown up to man's estate can utter such absurdities?

The demand for reciprocity is the child of a radical misconception-of the want of perception of a very simple fact. It mixes up and confounds together into one, two things which have no connection whatever with each other. It chooses to regard two separate trades as one; and on this blunder its absurd advice is founded. It does not see that the production of silks is a business which stands by itself. England decides not to protect her silks, but to buy the French silks, thereby saving wealth and avoiding the losses which protection always entails. There the matter ends. The French pursue the reverse policy. They protect their cottons, and will not buy those of England. That is a foolish proceeding, for France puts a tax upon herself, and restricts the trade between France and England. But what motive does the bad form which France gives to her cotton trade furnish to England for altering the sound organization she has bestowed on the silk trade? That organization was settled on its own merits without reference to anything else but silk. How can it be affected by what happens to cotton? How can a bad form given to the cotton-supply be a reason for a bad form also being given to the production of silk? Silk and cotton are perfect strangers to each other, touching at no point. Reciprocity may try for ever, but it will never find a reason why a country having received a hurt in one trade should, on that account, of her own doing, hurt herself in another.

Finally, what is to be done to end the commercial depression? Reverse the process which created it. Instead of over-consuming, make more wealth. Produce much, with earnestness and continuance of work, restoring the consumption that does and must go on with new wealth-making an addition to it by saving. The savings will be capital, instruments for increased production, and for accumulating a larger stock of wealth to be divided over the whole people. This enlarged stock will strike at the heart of the depression, as has been so manifestly shown by the effects on the commercial stock of the American people of the grand addition made to its wealth by the abundance of its harvests. That was a production of more, effected by the hand of Providence, but setting up a noble example for imitation and proclaiming the great economical truth that to make much all round is the root of all prosperity.

BONAMY PRICE.

IV.

THE EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN.

THE short period of fourteen years that has elapsed since the late war has been witness of a more wonderful moral and political revolution in these United States than has ever been recorded in history before.

Between four and five million human beings, who had hitherto been deprived of every right of human nature, have been suddenly precipitated into freedom and invested with the rights of republican citizens.

There have been instances before of the sudden emancipations of oppressed masses, but their results have been so fearful as to fill thoughtful minds with a just terror. The French Revolution with its sansculottism, its untold horrors, ended perforce in a despotism, and it was not without cause that an English thinker treated of our emancipation act as "Shooting Niagara." We have shot Niagara, and are alive and well. Our ship of state has been through those mighty rapids and plunged down that awful gulf, while nations held their breath, expecting to see her go to pieces. But lo! she has emerged, stanch and steady, and is now sailing on.

That the passengers have been somewhat tumbled about and shaken, that here and there a timber has cracked or a joint started, that there have been whirlpools and eddies, and uncomfortable sailing, we all know. But the miracle of our day is that the ship is sailing on, in better order than ever before-in better order, for that unwieldy stowage of oppression which she was obliged to carry has been thrown overboard, and she sails free!

In order justly to estimate the present state of education and progress among the freedmen of the United States, we must glance

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