Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/231

Rh  for her own purposes of and. At the beginning of the century two-thirds of the foreign commerce of was through, and was largely in the hands of. The commercial s of the s and of had only begun to make some figure. In 1787 was a small, having only 445  of 72,731 aggregate , and clearing inward and outward in foreign  less than double the amount of her own. At the same period, enriched though she had been by the with , had only 46,000 inhabitants; and , though a place of considerable , was still waiting the great impulse to be given to her  by liberal supplies of , and by the  of  and. It may be said, however, that in three eventful centuries the had been well explored. had been planted on every ; great had sprung up in vast solitudes or in  inhabited only by savage or decadent  of ; the most haughty and exclusive of ancient  had opened their  to foreign ; and all parts of the world been brought into habitual commercial intercourse. The s, subdued by the progress of to the service of, had begun to yield their own riches in great abundance; and the, , , , and other , prosecuted with ample  and hardy seamanship, had become the source of no small  in themselves. The lists of imports and exports and of the places from which they flowed to and from the centres of, as they swelled in bulk from time to time, show how busily and steadily the threads of commerce had been weaving together the and interests of , and extending a security and bounty of existence unknown in former ages. Apart from s, which commerce directly tends to avert, but which often spring from forces more powerful for the time than commercial interest, there remained little more by which a rapid extension of international could be impeded, save causes arising from ignorance or ; and among these deserves chiefly to be noticed the prevailing practice of s, in promoting their own several and, to wage a subtle  in times of peace on the  and  of each other. That foreign imports, and even domestic exports, should contribute some quota to the  is in itself a reasonable proposition. The, which has to register goods coming in and going out, and to exercise an official regulation in the , should defray at the least its own , like any other necessary mercantile function. The convenience of raising  by  on imports and exports is amply evinced by the universal adoption of this expedient; and the convenience will always be materially modified by the more or less crude or  form which the system of  has assumed, by the  exigency of, and by the degree in which other objects than those of  have been permitted to enter into the general policy. It has been argued with much plausibility that there are certain stages and conditions of some branches of, in which it is to protect them against unequal competition in their own s with the more advanced  and appliances of foreign , until they have by this means acquired ability to stand upon their own merits; and this being once admitted, the transition is easy to the general doctrine that, since every  always finds that there are  which other  can produce much better and cheaper than it can produce them for itself, it is wise and expedient to place the admission of nearly all foreign goods and produce under a  protective of the native. The interest of the  is here lost in another line of policy, because protective  carry the consequence that several parts of a  have to pay to several other parts more of their own means for what they need than they should have had to pay to the foreigner, and under a system of this kind the sources of , so far from being increased, are certain of being impaired. On the other hand, there are imports so entirely of foreign origin, and so free from considerations of competition with domestic, that a large may be raised upon them in the , without disturbing the  or equity of international. The immense  of the  from  on, , and  ( on s and foreign  may be excluded since they are set off by   on native s) is a remarkable example of the power of levying   in the  without infringing any commercial or  principle. The question of s thus appears to be capable of reasonable solution as long as it is kept within the circle of what is permanently expedient to the. When it passes beyond these bounds it launches into a of complicated errors. The idea or self-interest that has force to discourage the imports of foreign by protective  passes naturally onward to bounties on the export of some favoured articles of domestic produce, under which the same practical result is conversely produced, and one part of the  has to pay in es to the  some proportion of the price necessary to effect a sale abroad of the produce of another part of the. When bounties are given, they have to be accompanied with a series of compensations or &ldquo;drawbacks;&rdquo; and the confusion has often become so great, as when the export bounty is on the d article and the protective on the imported raw material, or as, say, when there is a  on foreign, and  on export are entitled to a drawback, that the  has been reduced to a , and anything it did seemed only to make the condition worse. This medley of cross-purposes is increased by the means adopted by parent on one hand to bolster, on another to  to themselves, the  of their, and by the elaborate rules of preference and exclusion by which  s have attempted to favour their own  in the. All the mischief of the protective and prohibitory system was exhibited by the Orders in Council of the British Government, and the Berlin and Milan decrees of, fulminated in the passion and fury of ; and if these high acts of power were seen to be not only futile and sublimely ridiculous, but in their aim and effects destructive of all commercial, it would argue little reason on the part of to carry out the same objects through the more calm, systematic, and insidious operation of mutually hostile s. Though nothing dies more slowly than the spirit of in , yet from many signs it may be hoped that this obstacle to commerce will gradually disappear like others.

The present century has witnessed an extension of the commercial relations of of which there is no parallel in. The facts are so well known that it is unnecessary to reproduce them in any detail; and yet it may be useful to indicate, however lightly, the principal phenonema. The heavy s and es, and the complications in which the close of the  s left the an, as well as the fall of prices which was the necessary effect of the sudden closure of a vast   and absorption of , had a crippling effect for many s on  energies. Yet even under such circumstances commerce is usually 