Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 by Various

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But there is no steam-engine in agriculture. The old state has no
superiority over the young one in the price of producing food; on the
contrary, it is decidedly its inferior. There, as in love, the apprentice
is the master. The proof of this is decisive. Poland can raise wheat with
ease at fifteen or twenty shillings a quarter, while England requires
fifty. The serf of the Ukraine would make a fortune on the price at which
the farmer of Kent or East Lothian would be rendered bankrupt. The Polish
cultivators have no objection whatever to a free competition with the
British; but the British anticipate, and with reason, total destruction
from the free admission of Polish grain. These facts are so notorious,
that they require no illustration; but nevertheless the conclusion to
which they point is of the highest importance, and bears, with
overwhelming force, on the theory of free trade as between an old and a
young community. They demonstrate that that theory is not only practically
pernicious, but on principle erroneous. It involves an oblivion of the
fundamental law of nature as to the difference between the effect of
wealth and civilization on the production of food and the raising of
manufactures. It proceeds on insensibility to the difference in the age
and advancement of nations, and the impossibility of a reciprocity being
established between them without the ruin of an important branch of
industry in each. It supposes nations to be of the same genus and age,
like the trees in the larch plantation, not of all varieties and ages, as
in the natural forest. If established in complete operation, it would only
lead to the ruin of the manufactures of the younger state, and of the
agriculture of the old one. The only reciprocity which it can ever
introduce between such states is the reciprocity of evil.

Illustrations from everyday life occur on all sides to elucidate the utter
absurdity, and, in fact, total impracticapability of the system of free
trade, as applied to nations who are, or are becoming, rivals of each
other in manufacturing industry. Those who have the advantage, will always
advocate free competition; those who are labouring under impediments, will
always exclaim against them. In some cases the young have the advantage,
in others the old; but in all the free system is applauded by those in the
sunshine, and execrated by those in the shade. The fair _debutante_ of
eighteen, basking in the bright light of youth, beauty, birth, and
connections, has no sort of objection to the freedom of choice in the
ball-room. If the mature spinster of forty would divulge her real opinion,
what would it be on the same scene of competition? Experience proves that
she is glad to retire, in the general case, from the unequal struggle, and
finds the system of established precedence and fixed rank at dinner
parties, much more rational. The leaders on the North Circuit--Sir James
Scarlett or Lord Brongham--have no objections to the free choice, by
solicitors and attorneys, for professional talent; but their younger
brethren of the gown are fain to take shelter from such formidable rivals
in the exclusive employment of the Crown, the East India Company, the Bank
of England, or some of the numerous chartered companies in the country.
England is the old lawyer on the Cirucuit in manufactures--but Poland is
the young beauty of the ball-room in agriculture. We should like to see
what sort of reciprocity could be established between them. Possibly the
young belle may exchange her beauty for the old lawyer's guineas, but it
will prove a bad reciprocity for both.

It is usual for both philosophers and practical men to ascribe the
superior cheapness with which subsistence can be raised in the young state
to the old one, to the weight of taxes and of debt, public and private,
with which the latter is burdened, from which the former is, in general,
relieved. But, without disputing that these circumstances enter with
considerable weight into the general result, it may safely be affirmed
that the main cause of it is to be found in two laws of nature, of
universal and permanent application. These are the low value of money in
the rich state, in consequence of its plenty, compared with its high value
in the poor one, in consequence of its poverty, and the experienced
inapplicability of machinery or the division of labour to agricultural
operations.

Labour is cheap in the poor state, such as Poland, Prussia, and the
Ukraine, becuase guineas are few.--"It is not," as Johnson said of the
Highlands, "that eggs are many, but that pence are few." Commercial
transactions being scanty, and the want of a circulating medium
inconsiderable, it exists to a very limited extent in the country. People
do not need a large circulating medium, therefore they do not buy it; they
are poor, therefore they cannot. In the opulent and highly advanced
community, on the other hand, the reverse of all this takes place.
Transactions are so frequent, the necessities of commerce so extensive,
that a large circulating medium is soon felt to be indispensable. In
addition to a considerable amount of specie, the aid of bank-notes, public
and private, of Government securities and exchequer bills, and of private
bills to an immense ammount, bcomes necessary. McCulloch calculates the
circulating medium of Great Britain, including paper and gold, at
L.72,000,000. The bills in circulation are probably in amount nearly as
much more. A hundred and forty, or a hundred and fifty millions, between
specie, bank-notes, exchequer bills, Government securities, on which
advances are made, and private bills, constitute the ordinary circulating
medium of twenty-seven millions in the British empire. The total
circulation of Russia, with sixty millions of inhabitants, is not forty
millions sterling. The effect of this difference is prodigions. It is no
wonder, whten it is taken into account, that wages are 5-1/2d. or 6d.
a-day in Poland or the Ukraine, and 2s. or 2s. 6d. a-day in England.

The clearest proof that this is the great cause of the superior cost of
raising subsistence in the old than the young state, is afforded by the
different value which money bears in different parts of the _same_
community. Ask any housekeeper what is the difference between the expense
of living in London, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, and he will answer, that
L.1500 a-year in Edingburgh, or L.750 in Aberdeen. Yet these different
places are all situated in the same community, and their inhabitants pay
the same public taxes, and very nearly the same of local ones. It is the
vast results arising from the concentration of wealth and expediture in
one place, compared with its abstraction from others, which occasions the
difference. But if this effect is conspicuous, and matter of daily
observation, in different parts of the same compact and moderately sized
country, how much more must it obtain in regard to different countries,
situated in different latitudes and politcal circumstances, and in
different stages of wealth, civilization, and commercial opulence? Between
England for example, and Poland or the Ukraine? The difference is there
important and durable. Wheat can be raised with as good a profit to the
cultivator for sixteen shillings per quarter in Poland, as for forty-eight
shillings in England or Scotland.

This superior weight of wages, rent and all the elements of cost, in the
old, when compared with the young community, affects the manufacturer as
well as the farmer; and in some branches of manufactures it does so with
an overwhelming effect. But, generally speaking, the advantages of capital,
machinery, and the division of labour, render the old state altogether
predominant over the young one in these particulars. It would seem to be a
fixed law of nature, that the progress of society adds almost nothing to
the application of machinery to agriculture, but indefinitely to its
importance in manufactures. Observe an old man digging his garden with a
spade--that is the most productive species of cultivation; it is the last
stage of agricultural progress to return to it. No steam engines or steam
ploughs will ever rival it. But what is the old weaver toiling with his
hands, to the large steam-power mill, turning at once ten thousand
spindles? As dust in the balance. Man, by a beneficent law of his Maker,
is permanently secured in his first and best pursuit. It is in those which
demoralize and degrade, that machinery progressively encroaches on the
labour of his hands. England can undersell India in muslins and printed
goods, manufactured in Lancashire or Lanarkshire, out of cotton which grew
on the banks of the Ganges; for England though younger in years compared
to India, is old in civilization, wealth, and power. We should like to see
what profit would be made by exporting wheat from England, raised on land
paying thirty shillings an acre of rent, by labourers paid at two
shillings a-day, to Hindostan, where rice is raised twice a-year, on land
paying five shillings an acre rent, by labourers receiving twopence a-day
each.

It is the constant operation of this law of nature which ensures the
equalization of empires, the happiness of society, and the dispersion of
mankind. To be convinced of this, we have only to reflect on the results
which would ensue if this were not the case; if no unvarying law gave man
in remote situations an advantage in raising subsistence over what they
enjoy in the centres of opulence; and agriculture, in the aged and wealthy
community, was able to acquire the same decisive superiority over distant
and comparatively poor ones, which we see daily examplified in the
production of manufactures. Suppose, for example, that in consequence of
the application of the steam-engine, capital, and machinery to the raising
of subsistence, Great Britian could undersell the cultivatiors of Poland
and the Ukraine as effectually as she does their manufacturers in the
production of cotton goods; that she could sell in the Polish market wheat
at five shillings a quarter, when they require fifteen shillings to
remunerate the cost of production. Would not the result be, that commerce
between them would be entirely destroyed; that subsistence would be
exclusively raised in the old opulent community; that mankind would
congregate in fearful multitudes round the great commercial emporium of
the world; and that the industry and progress of the more distant nations
would be irrevocably blighted? Whereas, by the operation of the present
law of nature, that the rich state can always undersell the poor one in
maufactures, and the poor one always undersell the rich one in subsistence,
those dangers are removed, a check is provided to the undue multiplication
of the species in particular situations, and the dispersion of mankind
over the globe--a vital object in the system of nature--is secured, from
the very necessities and difficulties in which, in the progress of society,
the old and wealthy community becomes involved.

These considerations point out an important limitation to which, on
principle, the doctrines of free trade must be subjected. Perfectly just
in reference to a single community, or a compact empire of reasonable
extent, they wholly fail when applied to separate nations in different
degrees of civilization, or even to different provinces of the same empire,
when it is of such an extent as to bring such different nations, in
various degrees of progress, under one common dominion. They were
suggested, in the first instance, to philosophers, by the absurd
restrictions on the commerce of grain which existed in France under the
old monarchy, and which Turgot and the Economists laboured so assiduously
to abolish. There can be no doubt that they were perfectly right in doing
so; for France is a compact, homogeneous country, in which the cost of
producing subsistence is not materially different in one part from another,
and the interests of the whole community are closely identified. The same
holds with the interchange of grain between the different provinces of
Spain, or for the various parts of the British islands. But the case is
widely different with an empire so extensive as, like the British in
modern or the Roman in ancient times, to embrace separate kingdoms, in
wholly different circumstances of climate, progress, and social condition.
Free trade, in such circumstances, must lead to a destruction of important
interests, and a total subversion of the balance of society in both the
kingdoms subjected to it. To be conviced of this, we have only to look at
the present condition of the British, or the past fate of the Roman empire.

It is the boast of our manufacturers--and such a marvel may well afford a
subject for exultation--that with cotton which grew on the banks of the
Ganges, they can, by the aid of British capital, machinery, and enterprise,
undersell, in the production of muslin and cotton goods, the native Indian
manufacturers, who work up their fabrics in the close vicinity of the
original cotton-fields. The constant and increasing export of Britsh goods
to India, two-thirds of which are cotton, demonstrates that this
superiority really exists; and that the muslin manufacturers in Hindostan,
who work for 3d. a-day on their own cotton, cannot stand the competition
of the British operatives, who receive 3s. 6d. a-day, aided as they are by
the almost miraculous powers of the steam-engine. Free trade, therefore,
is ruinous to the manufacturing interests of India; and accordingly the
Parliamentary proceedings are filled with evidence of the extreme misery
which has been brought on the native manufacturers of Hindostan by that
free importation of British goods, in which our political economists so
much and so fully exult.

The great distance of India from the British islands, the vast expense of
transporting bulky articles eight thousand miles accross the ocean, have
prevented the counterpart of this effect taking place; and the British
farmers feeling the depressing influence of the Indian plough, in like
manner as the Indian manufacturers have the ruinous competition of the
British steam-engine. But it is clear that, if India had been nearer, the
former effect would have taken place as well as the latter. If the shores
of Hindostan were within a few days sail of London and Liverpool, and the
Indian cultivators, labouring at 2d. or 3d. a-day, had been brought into
direct competition with the British farmers, employing labourers who
received two or three shillings, can there be a doubt that the British
farmers would have been totally destroyed in the struggle? The English
farmers would have been prostrated by the same cause which has ruined the
Indian muslin manufacturers. Cheap grain, the fruit of free trade, would
have demolished British agriculture as completely as cheap cotton goods,
the fruits of unlimited importation, has ruined Indian manufacturing
industry.

Is, then, commercial intercourse impossible, on terms of mutual benefit,
between states in widely different circumstatnces of commercial or
agricultural advancement; and is the only reciprocity which can exist
between them and reciprocity of evil? It is by no means necessary to rest
in so unsatisfatory a conclusion. A most advantageous commercial
intercourse to both parties may be carried on, but it must not be on the
footing of free trade. The foundation of such an intercourse should be,
that each should take, on the most favourable terms, the articles which
_it wants and does not produce_, and impose restrictions on those which
_it wants and does produce_. On this priciple, trade would be conducted so
as to benefit both countries, and injure neither. Thus England may take
from India to the utmost extent, and with perfect safety, sugar, indigo,
cotton, tea, spices, cinnamon, and the more costly species of shawls;
while India might take from England some species of cotton manufacture in
which they have no fabrics of their own, cutlery, hardware, and all of the
various luxuries of European manufacture. But a paternal and just
government, equally alive to the interests of all its provinces, how far
removed soever from the seat of power, would impose restrictions to
prevent India being deluged with British cottons, to the ruin of its
native manufactures, and to prevent Britian--if the distance did not
operate, which it certainly would, as a sufficient protection--from being
flooded with Indian grain. The varieties of climate, productions, and
wants, in different countries, are such, that commerce, regulated on these
principles, might be carried to the greatest extent consistent with the
paramount duty of providing in each state for the preservation of its
staple articles of industry.

The Roman empire in ancient times afforded the clearest demonstration of
the truth of these principles; and the fate of their vast dominion shows,
in the most decisive manner, what is the inevitable consequence to which
the free trade principles, now so strongly contended for by a party in
this country, must lead. Alison is the first modern author with whom we
are acquainted, who has traced the decline of the Roman empire in great
part to this source. In the tenth volume of his "History of Europe,"
p. 752, we find the following passage:--

"No nation can pretend to independence which rests for any sensible
protion of its subsistence in ordinary seasons on foreign, who may
become hostile, nations. And if we would see a memorable example of
the manner in which the greatest and most powerful nation may, in the
course of ages, come to be paralysed by this cause, we have only to
cast our eyes on imperial Rome, when the vast extent of the empire
had practically established a free trade in grain with the whole
civilized world; and the result was, that cultivation disappeared
from the Italian plains, that the race of Roman agriculturists, the
strength of the empire, became extinct, that the fields were laboured
only by slaves and cattle. The legions could no longer be recruited
but from foreign bands, vast tracts of pasturage overspread even the
fields of Lombardy and the Compagna of Naples, and it was the
plaintive confession of the Roman annalist, that the mistress of the
world had come to depend for her subsistence on the floods of the
Nile."

This observation has excited, as well it might, the vehement indignation
of the free trade journals. The example of the greates and most powerful
nation that ever existed being weakened, and at length ruined by a free
trade in corn, afforded too cogent an argument, and was too striking a
warning, not to excite the wrath of those who would precipitate Great
Britain into a similar course of policy. They have attacked the author,
accordingly, with unwonted asperity; and, while they admint the ruin of
Italian agriculture in the later stages of the Roman empire, endeavour to
ascribe it to the gratuitous distribution of grain to the Roman populace,
not the effect of a free importation of grain from its Egyptian and
African provinces. The vast importance of the subject has induced us to
look into the original authorities to whom Alison refers in support of his
observation, and from among them we select three--Tacitus, Gibbon, and
Michelet. Tacitus says,

"At Hercule _olim ex Itaila_ legionibus longinquas in provincias
commeatus portabantur, _nec nunc infecunditate laboratur_; sed Africam
_potius et Egyptum exercemus_, navibusque et casibus vita populi
Romani permissa est."--TACITUS, _Annal_. xii. 43.

Antiquity does not contain a more pregnant and important passage, or one
more directly bearing on the present policy of the Britsh emprire, than
this. It demonstrates: 1, That in former times Italy had been an exporting
country: "_olim_ ex Italia commeatus in longinquas provincias portabantur."
2, That at the time when Tacitus wrote, in the days of the Emperor Trajan,
it had ceased to be so, and had come to import largely from Africa and
Lybia, "sed _nunc_ Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus." 3, That this was
not the result of any supervening sterility or unfruitfulness, "nec nunc
infecunditate laboratur," but was from causes which made it more
profitable to purchase grain in the Egyptian or Lybian markets, "sed
Africam POTIUS et Egyptum exercemus."

Of the extent to which this decay of agriculture in the central
provinces of the Roman empire went, in the latter stages of its history,
we have the following striking account in the authentic pages of
Gibbon:--

"Since the age of Tiberius _the decay of agriculture had been felt in
Italy_; and it was a just subject of complaint that the life of the
Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and the waves. In
the division and decline of the empire, _the tributary harvests of
Egypt and Africa_ were withdrawn; the numbers of the inhabitants
continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and the country
was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, pestilence, and
famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and he affirms, with
strong exaggeration, that, in Emilia, Tuscany, and the adjacent
provinces, the human species was almost extirpated."--GIBBON, vol. vi.
c. xxxvi. p. 235.

Of the progress and extent of this decay, Gibbon gives the following
account in another part of his great work:--

"The agriculture of the Roman provinces _was insensibly ruined_; and
in the progress of despotism, which tends to disappoint its own
purpose, the emperors were obliged to derive some merit from the
forgiveness of debts, or the remission of tributes, which their
subjects were utterly incapable of paying. According to the new
division of Italy, the fertile and happy province of Campania, the
scene of the early victories and of the delicious retirements of the
citizens of Rome, extended between the sea and the Apennines, from
the Tiber to the Silarius. Within sixty years after the death of
Constantine, and on the evidence of an actual survey, an exemption
was granted in favour of 330,000 English acres _of desert and
uncultivated land, which amounted to one-eighth of the whole surface
of the province_. As the footsteps of the barbarians had not yet been
seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation, which is
recorded in the laws, (Cod. Theod. lxi. t. 38, l. 2,) can be ascribed
only to the administration of the Roman emperors."--GIBBON, vol. iii.
c. xviii. p. 87. Edition in 12 volumes.

Michelet observes, in his late profound and able History of France--

"The Christian emperors could not remedy the growing depopulation of
the country any more than their heathen predecessors. All their
efforts only showed the impotence of government to arrest that
dreadful evil. Sometimes, alarmed at the depopulation, they tried to
mitigate the lot of the farmer, to shield him against the landlord;
upon this the proprietor exclaimed he could no longer pay the taxes.
At other times they abandoned the farmer, surrendered him to the
landlord, and strove to chain him to the soil; but the unhappy
cultivators perished or fled, _and the land became deserted_. Even in
the time of Augustus, efforts were made to arrest the depopulation at
the expense of morals, by encouraging concubinage. Pertinax granted
an immunity from taxes to those who could occupy the desert lands of
Italy, _to the cultivators of the distant provinces, and the allied
kings_. Aurelian did the same. Probus was obliged to transport from
Germany men and oxen to cultivate Gaul.[13] Maximian and Constantius
transported the Franks and Germans from Picardy and Hainault into
Italy: but the depopulation in the towns and the country alike
continued. The people surrendered themselves in the fields to despair,
as a beast of burden lies down beneath his load and refuses to rise.
In vain the emperor strove, by offers of immunities and exemptions,
to recall the cultivator to his deserted fields. Nothing could do so.
The desert extended daily. At the commencement of the fifth century
there was, in the _happy_ Campania, the most fertile province of the
empire, 520,000 _jugera_ in a state of nature."--MICHELET, _Histoire
de France_, i. 104-108.

[13] "Arantur Gallicana rura _barbaris bobus_, et juga Germanica
captiva praebent colla nostris cultoribus."--_Probi Epist. ad
Senatum in Vopesio_.

Pursued to its very grave by the same deep-rooted cause of evil, the
strength of Italy, even in the last stages of its decay, was still
prostrated by the importation of grain from Egypt and Lybia. "The Campagna
of Rome," says Gibbon, "about the close of the sixth century, was reduced
to the state of _a dreary wilderness_, in which the land was barren, the
waters impure, and the air infectious. Yet the number of citizens _still
exceeded the measure of subsistence; their precarious food was supplied
from the harvests of Egypt and Lybia_; and the frequent repetitions of
famine betray the inattention of the emperors to a distant
provice."--GIBBON, vil. viii. c. xlv. 162.

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