than ever before.
And yet, it will be said, there are some things we can not produce in free competition with England. Of course there are; and it is to be hoped it will long continue so. If there are not some kinds of commodities which foreigners can produce to better advantage than we, then there will be no possibility of any foreign trade whatever; since, if they can send us nothing, they can take nothing from us. To deny this position, is to say that the export and import trade of the United States (amounting in 1883 to more than $1,500,000,000) is of no profit, and had best be entirely destroyed, in order that a few industries in which we have no natural advantages (and which employ less than one seventeenth of the laborers in the United States) should be continued at a loss to the general productiveness of our labor and capital, and so to a general diminution of wages and profits.
§ 7. —on the ground that it lowers prices.
The argument—heard less frequently now than formerly—has been advanced, drawn inductively from statistics, that protection does not raise prices; because, after duties are put on, a larger quantity is produced, the advantages of large production are reaped, and then the price of the manufactured commodity falls lower here than it was before the duty was imposed. The position is then held that protection does not raise prices. It is, of course, understood to mean the prices of protected commodities—a necessary precaution, because we find our own agricultural (unprotected) commodities cited to show that prices are lower here than in England.
No one, however, will deny that there has been a fall in the prices of textile fabrics and manufactured goods. That is the result of a general law of value, and of the tendencies of a progressive state of industry.372 The causes of this acknowledged fall would be at work, no matter whether tariffs existed or not. It is the