Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/63

Rh the scope of economic forces and the boundaries of existing nations. The argumentation is fatally broken at its first step. They do not show what they might show, viz., that the scope of economic forces on any given stage of the arts does form economic units. An English county was such a unit a century ago. I doubt if anything less than the whole earth could be considered so to-day, when the wool of Australia, the hides of South America, the cotton of Alabama, the wheat of Manitoba, and the meat of Texas meet the laborers in Manchester and Sheffield, and would meet the laborers in Lowell and Paterson, if the barriers were out of the way. But what the national protectionist would need to show would be that the economic unit coincides with the political unit. He would have to affirm that Maine and Texas are in one economic unit, but that Maine and New Brunswick are not; or that Massachusetts and Minnesota are in one economic unit, but that Massachusetts and Manitoba are not. Every existing state is a product of historic accidents. Mr. Jefferson set out to buy the city of New Orleans. He awoke one morning to find that he had bought the western half of the Mississippi Valley. Since that turned out so, the protectionists think that Missouri and Illinois prosper by trading in perfect freedom. If it had not turned out so, it would have been very mischievous for them to trade