Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/100

92 keep one million hundredweight, and exchange one million hundredweight of iron for two million bushels of wheat. The destruction of their wheat industry is a sign of a change in industry (unifying and not diversifying) by which they have gained a million bushels of wheat. Such is the gain of all trade. If the gain did not exist, trade would not be a feature of civilization.

(J) That it would be Wise to Call into Existence Various Industries, even at an Expense, if we could thus Offer Employment to all Kinds of Artisans, etc., who might Come to us.

126. This would be only maintaining public workshops at the expense of the taxpayers, and would be open to all the objections which are conclusive against public workshops. The expense would be prodigious, and the return little or nothing. This argument shows less sense of comparative cost and gain than any other which is ever proposed.

(K) That we Want to be Complete in ourselves and Sufficient to ourselves, and Independent, as a Nation, which State of Things will be Produced by Protection.

127. I will only refer to what I have already said about China and Japan (§ 69) as types of what this plan produces. If a number of families from among us should be shipwrecked on an island, their greatest woe would be that they could not trade with the rest of the world. They might live there "self-contained" and "independent," fulfilling the ideal of happiness which this proposition offers, but they would look about them to see a surfeit of things which, as they know, their friends at home would like to