Page:Karl Marx - Free Trade - tr. Florence Kelley (1888).djvu/23

 Rh goes from Lyons to Crefeld, where the protection price for fine cotton thread is considerably lower. French exports, as said before, consist chiefly of articles of luxury, where French taste cannot, as yet, be beaten; but the chief consumers, all over the world, of such articles are our modern upstart capitalists who have no education and no taste, and who are suited quite as well by cheap and clumsy German or English imitations, and often have these foisted upon them for the real French article at more than fancy prices. The market for those specialties which cannot be made out of France is constantly getting narrower, French exports of manufactures are barely kept up, and must soon decline; by what new articles can France replace those whose export is dying out? If anything can help here, it is a bold measure of Free Trade, taking the French manufacturer out of his accustomed hot-house atmosphere and placing him once more in the open air of competition with foreign rivals. Indeed, French general trade would have long since begun shrinking, were it not for the slight and vacillating step in the direction of Free Trade made by the Cobden treaty of 1860; but that has well-nigh exhausted itself and a stronger dose of the same tonic is wanted.

It is hardly worth while to speak of Russia. There, the protective tariff—the duties having to be paid in gold, instead of in the depreciated paper currency of the country—serves above all things to supply the pauper government with the hard cash indispensable for transactions with foreign creditors; on the very day on which that tariff fulfils its protective mission by totally excluding foreign goods, on that day the Russian government is bankrupt. And yet that same government amuses its subjects by dangling before their eyes the prospect of making Russia, by means of this