Page:Karl Marx - Free Trade - tr. Florence Kelley (1888).djvu/22

 18 would still clear a profit out of the government premium. Similarly, the potato-spirit distilleries receive, in consequence of recent legislation, a present, out of the pockets of the public, of about nine million dollars a year. And as almost every large land-owner in Northeastern Germany is either a beet-root sugar manufacturer or a potato-spirit distiller, or both, no wonder the world is literally deluged with their productions.

This policy, ruinous under any circumstances, is doubly so in a country whose manufactures keep up their standing in neutral markets chiefly through the cheapness of labor. Wages in Germany, kept near starvation point at the best of times, through redundancy of population (which increases rapidly, in spite of emigration), must rise in consequence of the rise in all necessaries caused by protection; the German manufacturer will, then, no longer be able, as he too often is now, to make up for a ruinous price of his articles by a deduction from the normal wages of his hands, and will be driven out of the market. Protection, in Germany, is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

France, too, suffers from the consequences of protection. The system, in that country, has become, by its two centuries of undisputed sway, almost part and parcel of the life of the nation. Nevertheless, it is more and more becoming an obstacle. Constant changes in the methods of manufacture are the order of the day; but protection bars the road. Silk velvets have their backs nowadays made of fine cotton thread; the French manufacturer has either to pay protection price for that, or to submit to such interminable official chicanery as fully makes up for the difference between that price and the government drawback on exportation; and so the velvet trade