III. (1)

The object aimed at in the application of science to industry, the use of steam and electricity, the organisation of postal telegraphic and telephonic communication, and the perfection of the banking system, is the reduction of the selling price of goods, i.e., cheapness. Protectionism raises its wall of tariffs and says, “I will make things dear.”

The first two steamers crossed the Atlantic in 1837; in 1842 a Home Industry Convention meeting at New York drew attention to the necessity of protecting Edition: current; Page: [viii] the United States against ocean traffic by steam. When the Saint Gothard Tunnel was opened the South Germans demanded a raising of the tariff to protect them against the influx of Italian goods. In 1891 M. Teisserenc de Bort, in the name of the Limousin cattle-breeders, opposed the Havre and Rouen harbour works. All this was logical enough: a Protectionist who spends millions on a port and then builds a tariff wall to close it, and who digs tunnels instead of cutting the railway lines at each frontier, is involved in contradictions which prove the malady of his mind. When the first fire-engine appeared in Japan the carpenters asked to have it removed because it robbed workmen of the employment provided by fires. Bastiat himself never invented anything better.

Progress is in inverse ratio to the coercive action of man on man, in direct ratio to his command over things. The Protectionist, by trying to prevent his countrymen from consuming what they choose, wishes to remove them from the effects of all external progress, and when he gains his ends he may indeed find the most extravagant conceptions of Swift pale before the irony of his creation.